If they did their *own* cross-breeding
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Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In the case of corn Monsanto is building on 7,000 years of open source work by farmers, plus open-source seed banks. Monsanto should be kept to a high standard of proof that they did original work. Simply crossbreeding a few "open source" plants to get a new mix of traits shouldn't be enough. There have been documented cases of patents on very old plants or methods for using plants. For example, the Neem patent- patenting a 2000 year old method of using the Neem tree oil as a pesticide. Or the Enola yellow bean patent where an American company got a patent on a bean they'd bought from Mexican bean farmers. They then sued those farmers exporting yellow beans into the US.
Patent = a new solution to an old problem? Possibly a good patent. Patent = an old solution applied to a new problem? Probably a bad / stupid patent.
Patenting an old solution (yellow colored beans) to an old problem (how to make yellow colored beans)? Extaordinarily stupid patent. Similarly there is the patent for the bacterial BT gene put into plants. BT is an old (and open source / farming) solution to a problem (how to get a toxin to kill pest insects). The "new" problem was how to get plants to express that same gene / toxin. All they did was move an old algorithm into a new situation and they get a patent.
Its as if Microsoft got a patent for GUIs simply by moving them from Xerox or Mac machines into IBM machines. Or in the case of the Neem or Yellow Bean patents, its like Microsoft got a patent on Babbage engines or Turing machines- simply because the original work had been done in other countries.
Another case: 100k lives vs. hair removal
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Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Informative
As I'd commented in Open Source for Biotechnology:"as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO. We have to talk about the real costs and benefits of how our patents and methods affect people.
One example: trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500,000/year, kills 100,000/year. And it drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment Melarsoprolcontains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream. So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. Because this is Slashdot, got to have some software analogies... they can be made. In the software world of closed source, Microsoft can discontinue support for a product, and people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. Or you can be the country of Iceland, volunteering to do all the work to make an Icelandic language verion of Windows 98, and Microsoft can just refuse you. In the biotech/med world of closed source, you can be 500,000 people not wanting to inject arsenic in their veins, and Aventis can still discontinue support for for your non-arsenic drug treatment.
It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type. Other posters in here have pointed out how many patented drugs often are first found in university labs (taxpayer funded, open source methods) before disappearing into a licencing hole.
If they came up with *novel* uses, sure...
on
Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"Patent law, as we know, requires inventions to be novel and not obvious to one skilled in the art. But the patent office has taken too liberal a definition of novel. They are granting patents when the problem is novel, and the filer is the first to try to solve it. As such their answer to the new question is novel. The better patents are ones that solve older problems.
Amazon was one of the earliest internet shopping operations. So of course they were among the first to look hard at the UI for that style of shopping, and thus were first to file an invention called one-click-buy. But one-click-buy was really just an obvious answer to a new problem..."
Or, in short:
Patent = a new solution to an old problem? Good patent.
Patent = an old solution applied to a new problem? Possibly a bad / stupid patent.
But in the case of most of these life patents, they've patented an old solution to an old problem: there isn't any novelty there.
They're patenting "method to find gene for making dragonfly wings as used by dragonflies in flying," which was only novel about, say 300 million years ago. Now if instead they were patenting "method for gene for making dragonfly wings added to tomatoes so they fly straight to the harvest box" that would be a new and original idea.
And in agricultural patents they've been able to patent genes / traits that were previously developed by groups of farmers. i.e. its like they're not only violating the GPL, but patenting the software they've borrowed.
Already happened once: southern corn leaf blight
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Open Source Life?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In the early 1970's, a new variety of corn was released in the US; the "Texas male sterile". This variety had many desirable properties, and growers were excited about it, planting it over miles and miles of corn acreage in US . It was, of course, bred to be resistant to the most common corn diseases. However, it did not have genes for resistance to a previously unimportant strain of a fungal disease; the southern corn leaf blight (caused by the fungus Helminthosporium maydis).
Ninety percent of the corn sowed in the US in 1970 was genetically susceptibility to this pathogen. The fungus encountered all this acreage of susceptible host and wiped out one fourth of the US corn crop in 1970, a loss of over one billion dollars in production! If the corn acreage hadn't been such a monoculture, the fungus wouldn't have been able to spread as rapidly, as it would have encountered barriers of genetically resistant plants.
"the overall problem with current biotechnology is that it is proprietary / closed source / locked hood genetics. The applications might be wonderful, but the methodology and implementations leave a lot to be desired if you like open source science.
Just like with proprietary software, if you see some nifty new feature you'd like to add you your own application, you can't. In proprietary software you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and perhaps the support package and perhaps the computer to run it on). In much of current biotechnology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (and you only get a limited choice of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year. Smart Breeding, in contrast, is a close equivalent of open source software."
Ways in which Locked-hood genetics is like proprietary software:
The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
they have all or nothing security models
They break standards.
they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
Specific problems solved by (closed source / locked hood) genetic engineering can also be solved in other ways. Word isn't the only way to write a document. Golden rice isn't the only way to get more vitamin A to people.
Opportunity Costs- what do you lose if you spend a big chunk of money on a single proprietary solution? You lose flexibility.
From a a very well-written essay on why privacy is a fundamental and important right (written by the former privacy czar of Canada, warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans already have):
"But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being.
If someone intrudes on our privacy - by peering into our home, going through the personal things in our office desk, reading over our shoulder on a bus or airplane, or eavesdropping on our conversation - we feel uncomfortable, even violated.
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do.
A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away.It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm..."
Go read the rest of this prescient article. Unfortunately its being used as an 'antiblueprint' by Ashcroft et ilk. Everything warned against Ashcroft wants to implement.
I think there's been some amnesia about war deaths that occured within North America. This perhaps contributed to the feeling that we're safe here in the US- the enemy kills "over there." A good sense of "it's rare, but it can happen here" would have been more useful than the "it can't happen here" feelings that existed pre-9/11.
Post 9/11 I remember commentary on how this was the first major strike in the US from an enemy-- as if that whole British/Canadian invasion and burning down the White House hadn't occured. But that's old history.
But more recently, during WWII German submarines made it fairly far up the St. Lawrence Seaway. One of my grand-uncles was killed on Canadian soil by German soldiers from a sub. I don't know if this also happened to American soldiers- if it did I didn't read about it in my history books.
In addition, the Germans came fairly close to being able to bomb Canada and the US from the north. German subs were going into James Bay and dropping off portable metal runways: economics kept them from finishing that project and bringing in special planes. Had they finished, German planes could have hit Chicago or Toronto from a remote launch point less than 700 miles away. (Another of my Canadian relatives saw the remants of these German runways when he was growing up in northern Ontario, which is how I heard of it. Again, not through a history book.)
Greg Egan, Charlie Stross , Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks... All great writers at the cutting edge of SF. We're not going to see their SF done well as movies anytime soon. I think one Egan short story (about clones and identity-- well written but an older SF theme) was done for the new Outer Limits. I'm trying to imagine what Hollywood would do with a story about sadness and the life of ordinary deathless people: probably twist the story into the moral that we should accept death or some other ending that entirely bypasses the story. They'd end up with another "Based on the title of the story by..." movie ala Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
As I recently wrote, SF movies are 30 years behind SF literature. Hollywood has barely been able to capture the feel of cyberpunk. I doubt that Hollywood could even start to do pre/post Singularity science fiction (which all of the above writers excel in).
As an SF fan, I'm often slightly annoyed ("slightly" because I've become used to it) at the ignorance (1) of the differences between written and media SF as shown by pop culture writers and reviewers. The media coverage given to the museum will reduce this ignorance by some amount- however marginal- that's good.
Most media SF is 30-40 years behind written SF, both in topics and style. Few current SF movie or TV shows show concepts that weren't already old-hat in the 1970's SF literature. This museum doesn't seem to be afraid of gently pointing this out. As many board members are SF writers I could guess how they'd push giving credit where it is due. Of course the movies have had much more influence in terms of numbers of people seeing them (I read a calculation saying 23 of the top 25 movies by popularity have been SF/fantasy).
But for influence on science and technology- the books and stories have done quite a lot more. For one example, I like a quote that Cory Doctorow (who does fine post-singularity writing) has on Neuromancer:
"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading. I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."
I think Heinlein created more engineers than Sputnik did.
(1) When talking about SF topics, pop writers can get away with a show of ignorance that wouldn't work for many other genres. How many reviewers compare a movie to anything more than other movies and/or "the Time Machine, F451, Ray Bradbury, Star Wars, the Matrix [and if they've done extra research] P.K.Dick"? That'd be like mystery reviewers starting with A.C. Doyle and ending with Agatha Christie. How many reviews of books like "Prey," "Oryx and Crake," "Children of Men" or "Fatherland" mention anything about similar SF books (books written in some cases decades before) and instead talk about how original the popular author's idea is? (For example CoM published in the early 90's, vs Greybeard published in the early 60's. Many reviews of the former didn't mention the latter.)
The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
they have all or nothing security models
They break standards.
they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
But as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO.
For example, look at trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500k/year, kills 100k/year, drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment (Melarsoprol) contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream. So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. The analogy to software can still be made: when Microsoft discontinues support for a product, people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. When Aventis discontinues support for a product, people suffer as well. It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type.
(Notice that the EFF also was on that ArtNet case.) Anyways, when the EFF took on the 2600 case, it was defending a magazine that looks fairly ugly from the outside. I mean- hackers advocating piracy and breaking into things and ruining Hollywood as an industry? Thats about as hard to take for some people as a strangly illuminated crucifix is to other people.
Like your other respondant implied, I'm sure the ACLU would love to get cases where they're defending painters of apples and kittens and sad-faced clowns. The EFF would love to get "Ashcroft vs. Widows and Orphans Programming, Inc.". The government isn't that stupid- it'll send the worst looking cases first, to try to remove any public sympathy.
But like any non-profit, especially small non-profits, the EFF is limited by the amount of funding it has: they more you donate, the more cases they can take. So donate or volunteer now-- its your freedom of technological development insurance policy. It helps to ensure you can call someone who'll understand why your prosecution under the "2006 XYZ DRM Technobabble Here Act" has constitutional implications. The EFF was there for 2600 and Dmitry and many more. How many other organizations would have been ready to care about DeCSS or UCITA... not many. Other organizations get cases that 20 million people really care about. The EFF has taken cases that only a fraction of Slashdot cares about- but are still just as important. (Slashdot has 100's of thousands of readers. The EFF has an order of magnitude less members. Why haven't you joined? Quantity isn't everything, but it helps impress the congresscritters and it makes it more likely they can afford to take your case when you call them up. Take your case to the Supreme Court if needed.)
Parenthetically, 2600 wasn't an easy posterboy for programming rights case: neither the government nor the RIAA / MPAA / Disney conglomerates are ever going to be that nice. The EFF took the case anyways.
Two things: 1. the general takeaway from my paleo class was that no species over about 20kg survived that event- none have been found, yet. By size almost all dinosaurs, but no birds or mammals were over 20kg at that time.
(The "larger" mammal you show was still just a few kg: not much larger than a large rat. You mention bird ancestors- the closest relatives like the velociraptors were larger than 20kg. But, by 65 myo birds themselves- recognizable to us as being like what we have to day- existed. This would include species that lived in water or near water.)
2. This new article suggests that only burrowing / nocturnal animals (mammals, small non-dinosaur reptiles like snakes) and animals that lived in swamps / water (birds, small species of crocodiles) survived. These two patterns put together can account for the survival patterns amoung classes / families of animals. Only the smallest dinosaurs (birds) survived- probably branching out from water-dwelling species. Mammals and other reptiles branched out from the nocturnal and/or burrowing species that survived. Everything large on land died. I would still wonder about the large ocean-dinosaurs (the ones that looked like dolphins). Perhaps their food supply was disrupted long enough (if the whole food chain was broken) for them to not make it. Sharks and crocodiles could be more versatile. But who knows... its an interesting theory that the article had, but it still needs much more corroboration: thats how science goes.
The extinction event killed off all species larger than about 20kg. That wouldn't have included any mammals. Mammals 65 million years ago were tiny (mice sized) and most likely nocturnal.
while.04% sounds small, 1/2,500 doesn't. That would be:
One terrorist per 10 airplane flights
several terrorists per large sporting event or rock concert
400 in Silicon Valley (although 30 were laid off and are moving back in w/ the parents)
So if there are that many terrorists floating about, they've got to be terribly incompetent ones. We should be swarming with terrorist events, shouldn't we? Even if they are all zombie terrorists, pinging the master to see when to go off, shouldn't at least 0.1% of them have gone off early? Leading to 1 terror event every three days? (assuming they are industrious and want to do one event per year)
Is your name David Nelson? You're now on the "always a suspect" list at airports. By my rough estimate (based on the number of Davids and Nelsons in the Census data) there are about 5,500 of them in the US. Evidently there is one "David Nelson" who is a criminal- because of him, all others get checked. David Nelson the child TV star. David Nelson the Washinton State Senator.
Administered by airlines since November 2001, the "no-fly" list has resulted in routine stops of passengers without terrorist ties who "have no meaningful opportunity to clear their names," said the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"They are detained, interrogated, delayed, embarrassed, humiliated in front of other passengers," said plaintiffs' attorney Reggie Shuford, an ACLU senior staff attorney...
Plaintiff David Nelson, 34, a trial attorney in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, said he has been stopped more than 30 times -- every flight he's taken since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which gave rise to the "no-fly" list.
"This week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."
"Remember Ozzie and Harriet's son, David Nelson? "I got stopped at the John Wayne Airport" in Orange County, Calif., he said by phone from Los Angeles this week. "Two police officers knew who I was and tried to explain to the guy behind the security desk. It didn't faze him at all." Even as another officer was saying he had once met David's mother, Harriet, David was being instructed to remove his shoes, he says. "I asked, 'Does the guy on the list have a middle name of Ozzie?' He said, 'It just says David Nelson.' "
parenthetically- that of the 80 highest scores "five were among the Sept. 11 hijackers" doesn't show that the system works. It most likely shows that the hijackers' profiles were part of the 'seed profiles' used to teach / test the system. And 120,000!... any chance of false positives? Go re-read this Bruce Schneier essay.
Why should any regular individual be worried about these systems? From the best essay on privacy and 9/11 laws I've seen (from the former privacy czar of Canada- warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans have already lost):
"...But there also will be tangible, specific harm. The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
"Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada...
" Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
"...When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that matters and that human rights such as privacy are a luxury. But such extremes can only reward and encourage terrorism, not diminish it. They can only devastate our lives, without commensurately safeguarding them. Of course we all want to be safe. But we could be safer from terrorism - perhaps - if we permanently evacuated all the high-rise office towers, if we closed down the subways, if we forever grounded all airplanes. Yet no reasonable person would be likely to argue for adopting such measures. We'd say, "We want to be safe, yes - but not at the price of sacrificing our whole way of life." The same reasoning should apply, in my view, to arguments that privacy should indiscriminately be sacrificed on the altar of enhanced security..."
Moller is a Davis (California) institution. The tourguides mentioned him and his "almost ready for launch car" when I was touring UCDavis to choose a school. And when I graduated. And when I visit my friends there. And when my now baby niece starts touring potential universities: I'm sure they'll still talk about how he's almost there.
Here are 29 (now 30) evidences for macroevolution, all testable, all falsifiable, none yet falsified. These are all "major predictions of the hypothesis of common descent...with examples of confirmations and potential falsifications..." Note the documentation / references: the 140 years of observations and intense testing based on multiple independent science research fields are there for us to examine.
Not that the evidence isn't also compatible with creators / designers... but those designers are not only plagarists, but very bad plagarists. Not only have they never surprised us with original code, the copies / plagarism also include copies of all previous copying errors (like the primates having an almost working- but for a few errors- version of vitamin C manufacturing. Yay scurvy: other mammals don't have to worry about it.)
"Island biogeography" (IG) is a field of study which will give examples of post-bottleneck evolution. When new islands show up (example: Hawaiian volcanic islands), only a limited number of founding species fly / float in. Depending on the distance from the nearest continent, there will be limited numbers of orders or even classes represented. However, within those orders you can still see a significant number of species. They'll all be related, and on the nearest continent (by distance or by ocean current) you'll find the next most related species- related to the founding species on the island.
Arar IS Canadian. To say otherwise is to say that naturalization doesn't mean anything, because he gave up his Syrian citizenship when he became Canadian. Now Syria might not accept that, in the possesive "you can't divorce me- you'll always be mine even if you left because I was hunting you down" stalker sort of way. By why would we take Syria seriously on this?
Supposedly the US believes that a person who freely joins a country is just as much a citizen as one born to the land (other than that not being a president clause). The behavior of the officials sending Arar to Syria says otherwise: this should frighten any naturalized US citizen. The US sending Arar to Syria was an expediency issue: they could outsource the extraordinary rendition(*) they wanted for Arar. His Syrian past was convenient to the US officials wanting to work on him. (*torture)
A useful term in the quest for happiness and good bargains is satisficing, that is, to get what is "good enough," even if it isn't the best bargain. As written about in this paper on Maximizing Versus Satisficing, trying to get the best possible price can lead to unhappiness: sometimes its better to go with the "reasonable enough" deal.
Unless, of course, the hunt itself makes you happy. I'm a frugal person myself (and recommend Usenet's misc.consumers.frugal-living). But I've had a couple of friends who took frugality too far - to the point where they were valuing their personal time at an epsilon above zero.
Adam Smith's version of the invisible hand doesn't necessarily fit with a-national multinational corporations:
"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
Anyways, its good to point out that for most Americans / most American history, we did work 10-12 hour days, 6 days a week, without much expectation of spending time with families, vacations, benefits, disability pay or the right to unionize.Many workers fought hard- many died (check out the early history of Pinkertons) for the right to ask for better working conditions.
If we're being asked to compete on the basis of education or simply on wage differentials, thats one thing. But with some of our competition we also have to compete against the loss of all the workplace rights fought for over generations in the US.
If you are driving you have to have ID with you, but you aren't required to have your name in machine readable type up on the dashboard.
320 million in 2004 for Google Network alone
on
Google Files for IPO
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· Score: 1
Based on the 80 million for Q1 2004 (with expenses for that of 9 million, Q104). Google says that the margin for Google Network is lower than that of Google's own ads. But, as "We share most of the fees these ads generate with our Google Network members," some people are making some nice money with Google. Time to stop posting on Slashdot and start improving my own websites.
Foresight Institute (and its Guidelines), anyone?
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Diamond Age Approaching?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Back in 1999 the Foresight Institute released the first version of the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. . These guidelines, interestingly enough, ended up in the US Congresses' recent (2003) bill on Molecular manufacturing / nanontechnology studies.
One point that the F.I. makes that often gets missed in discussion of nano: molecular nanotechnology != self-replicating machines. As Eric Drexler writes: "Much has been made of a concern I raised in 1986, under the name "gray goo" -- a hypothetical scenario involving runaway replicators. Building fully self-replicating machines would be difficult, however, and building machines that could replicate without external help would be more difficult still. Current work in the field shows that it will be easier and more efficient to develop molecular manufacturing without building any self-replicating machines at all."
One measure of the existence or success of a field is the jobs available in it: jobs certainly exist in 2004. By 2014 it should be really interesting. Another measure is "does the field have its equivalent of Slashdot?" Yup, Nanodot.
Foresight's concern for the long-term potential abuse of nanotechnology has been confirmed and strengthened. Those who abuse technology -- from airliners to anthrax -- for destructive ends do exist and are unlikely to stop before full nanotech arrives, with all its power for both good and ill.
Foresight's position favoring speedy development of advanced nanotech has also been strengthened. The longer we wait, the better the infrastructure worldwide, the smaller the budget and project needed -- and the easier to hide the work. Let's do it fast, while it's more difficult, expensive, and harder to conceal.
Our advocacy of openness as the safest strategy has been validated. In under two hours, the problem of airliners hitting buildings was solved -- by passengers in the fourth plane to be highjacked. They did it "open source style": shared information on the need, collaborative design, and unpaid group implementation. (With earlier information, they might have been able to save their own lives, as well as those in the building their plane was meant to hit.) Their example can inspire us as we work to find a "bottom-up," distributed, networked, immune-system-style defense against the abuse of nanotechnology.
There are no good excuses for lack of foresight. We've got to be pro-active, not just reactive. Environmentalist-architect William McDonough wrote the following about environmental disasters, but it applies just as well to Sept. 11 or a future abuse of nanotech: "You can't say it's not part of your plan that these things happened, because it's part of your de facto plan. It's the thing that's happening because you have no plan...We own these tragedies. We might as well have intended for them to occur."
Slashdot Mirror
As I just referenced from telling good patents from bad patents:
Patenting an old solution (yellow colored beans) to an old problem (how to make yellow colored beans)? Extaordinarily stupid patent. Similarly there is the patent for the bacterial BT gene put into plants. BT is an old (and open source / farming) solution to a problem (how to get a toxin to kill pest insects). The "new" problem was how to get plants to express that same gene / toxin. All they did was move an old algorithm into a new situation and they get a patent.Its as if Microsoft got a patent for GUIs simply by moving them from Xerox or Mac machines into IBM machines. Or in the case of the Neem or Yellow Bean patents, its like Microsoft got a patent on Babbage engines or Turing machines- simply because the original work had been done in other countries.
One example: trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500,000/year, kills 100,000/year. And it drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment Melarsoprol contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. Because this is Slashdot, got to have some software analogies... they can be made. In the software world of closed source, Microsoft can discontinue support for a product, and people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. Or you can be the country of Iceland, volunteering to do all the work to make an Icelandic language verion of Windows 98, and Microsoft can just refuse you. In the biotech/med world of closed source, you can be 500,000 people not wanting to inject arsenic in their veins, and Aventis can still discontinue support for for your non-arsenic drug treatment.
It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type. Other posters in here have pointed out how many patented drugs often are first found in university labs (taxpayer funded, open source methods) before disappearing into a licencing hole.
- Patent = a new solution to an old problem? Good patent.
- Patent = an old solution applied to a new problem? Possibly a bad / stupid patent.
But in the case of most of these life patents, they've patented an old solution to an old problem: there isn't any novelty there.They're patenting "method to find gene for making dragonfly wings as used by dragonflies in flying," which was only novel about, say 300 million years ago. Now if instead they were patenting "method for gene for making dragonfly wings added to tomatoes so they fly straight to the harvest box" that would be a new and original idea.
And in agricultural patents they've been able to patent genes / traits that were previously developed by groups of farmers. i.e. its like they're not only violating the GPL, but patenting the software they've borrowed.
Unfortunately the business model of closed source genetics promotes monocultures. As I commented in April's story Smart Breeding to Beat Biotechnology:
"the overall problem with current biotechnology is that it is proprietary / closed source / locked hood genetics. The applications might be wonderful, but the methodology and implementations leave a lot to be desired if you like open source science.
Just like with proprietary software, if you see some nifty new feature you'd like to add you your own application, you can't. In proprietary software you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and perhaps the support package and perhaps the computer to run it on). In much of current biotechnology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (and you only get a limited choice of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year. Smart Breeding, in contrast, is a close equivalent of open source software."
Ways in which Locked-hood genetics is like proprietary software:
From a a very well-written essay on why privacy is a fundamental and important right (written by the former privacy czar of Canada, warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans already have):
"But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being.
If someone intrudes on our privacy - by peering into our home, going through the personal things in our office desk, reading over our shoulder on a bus or airplane, or eavesdropping on our conversation - we feel uncomfortable, even violated.
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do.
A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away.It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm..."
Go read the rest of this prescient article. Unfortunately its being used as an 'antiblueprint' by Ashcroft et ilk. Everything warned against Ashcroft wants to implement.
Post 9/11 I remember commentary on how this was the first major strike in the US from an enemy-- as if that whole British/Canadian invasion and burning down the White House hadn't occured. But that's old history.
But more recently, during WWII German submarines made it fairly far up the St. Lawrence Seaway. One of my grand-uncles was killed on Canadian soil by German soldiers from a sub. I don't know if this also happened to American soldiers- if it did I didn't read about it in my history books.
In addition, the Germans came fairly close to being able to bomb Canada and the US from the north. German subs were going into James Bay and dropping off portable metal runways: economics kept them from finishing that project and bringing in special planes. Had they finished, German planes could have hit Chicago or Toronto from a remote launch point less than 700 miles away. (Another of my Canadian relatives saw the remants of these German runways when he was growing up in northern Ontario, which is how I heard of it. Again, not through a history book.)
As I recently wrote, SF movies are 30 years behind SF literature. Hollywood has barely been able to capture the feel of cyberpunk. I doubt that Hollywood could even start to do pre/post Singularity science fiction (which all of the above writers excel in).
Most media SF is 30-40 years behind written SF, both in topics and style. Few current SF movie or TV shows show concepts that weren't already old-hat in the 1970's SF literature. This museum doesn't seem to be afraid of gently pointing this out. As many board members are SF writers I could guess how they'd push giving credit where it is due. Of course the movies have had much more influence in terms of numbers of people seeing them (I read a calculation saying 23 of the top 25 movies by popularity have been SF/fantasy).
But for influence on science and technology- the books and stories have done quite a lot more. For one example, I like a quote that Cory Doctorow (who does fine post-singularity writing) has on Neuromancer:
I think Heinlein created more engineers than Sputnik did.(1) When talking about SF topics, pop writers can get away with a show of ignorance that wouldn't work for many other genres. How many reviewers compare a movie to anything more than other movies and/or "the Time Machine, F451, Ray Bradbury, Star Wars, the Matrix [and if they've done extra research] P.K.Dick"? That'd be like mystery reviewers starting with A.C. Doyle and ending with Agatha Christie. How many reviews of books like "Prey," "Oryx and Crake," "Children of Men" or "Fatherland" mention anything about similar SF books (books written in some cases decades before) and instead talk about how original the popular author's idea is? (For example CoM published in the early 90's, vs Greybeard published in the early 60's. Many reviews of the former didn't mention the latter.)
- The (food/software) itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle treadmill
- The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
- they have all or nothing security models
- They break standards.
- they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures.
But as others have pointed out, software development isn't as expensive as biotech / pharma development. On the other hand, the potential cost to human lives of closed vs. open source development for biotech is also huge. We should be talking about it at least as much as we talk about SCO.For example, look at trypanosomiasis- sleeping sickness. Infects 500k/year, kills 100k/year, drives you mad before you go into a coma and die. The older treatment (Melarsoprol) contains arsenic (and anti-freeze) and kills over 5% of patients taking it. It also feels like injecting bleach into the body. Another newer treatment (Eflornithine) works better and has far less severe side effects. It was used throughout the 90's as the best treatment. However, Eflornithine was only commercially manufactured as a potential cancer treatment-- once found to not work on cancer, there was no reason to continue making it, and Aventis ended production of eflornithine in 1999. As the last of the old stock ran out, patients had to go back to the dangerous and painful arsenic treatment.
Luckily for those 500,000 people per year, eflornithine was later found to have one important use: its a fine facial hair depilatory cream . So as the production of this drug was re-started to prevent the horror of unwanted facial hair, 500k people get the side-benefit of a non-arsenic treatment for a deadly disease. But only because eflornithine was found to treat excess hair, not because it prevents painful death.
This is just one anecdote- one illness. The analogy to software can still be made: when Microsoft discontinues support for a product, people suffer from the time and money to upgrade. When Aventis discontinues support for a product, people suffer as well. It could be argued that eflornithine wouldn't have existed without closed-source drug development: but that doesn't seem to be the case here. First, while drug production is closed-source, basic research is at heart open-source. Sencond, Al Sjoerdsma, the scientist who first discovered its properties was apparently more of a Tim Berners-Lee type than a Gates or Darl McBride type.
Like your other respondant implied, I'm sure the ACLU would love to get cases where they're defending painters of apples and kittens and sad-faced clowns. The EFF would love to get "Ashcroft vs. Widows and Orphans Programming, Inc.". The government isn't that stupid- it'll send the worst looking cases first, to try to remove any public sympathy.
For example, back when talk of "the importance of 128 bit encryption in your browser" would have been met with blank stares by most organizations like the ACLU, the EFF was fighting for the right to real encryption. Privacy, technology and Carnivore? Or DRM and HDTV and the implications for Fair Use?
But like any non-profit, especially small non-profits, the EFF is limited by the amount of funding it has: they more you donate, the more cases they can take. So donate or volunteer now-- its your freedom of technological development insurance policy. It helps to ensure you can call someone who'll understand why your prosecution under the "2006 XYZ DRM Technobabble Here Act" has constitutional implications. The EFF was there for 2600 and Dmitry and many more. How many other organizations would have been ready to care about DeCSS or UCITA... not many. Other organizations get cases that 20 million people really care about. The EFF has taken cases that only a fraction of Slashdot cares about- but are still just as important. (Slashdot has 100's of thousands of readers. The EFF has an order of magnitude less members. Why haven't you joined? Quantity isn't everything, but it helps impress the congresscritters and it makes it more likely they can afford to take your case when you call them up. Take your case to the Supreme Court if needed.)
Parenthetically, 2600 wasn't an easy posterboy for programming rights case: neither the government nor the RIAA / MPAA / Disney conglomerates are ever going to be that nice. The EFF took the case anyways.
(The "larger" mammal you show was still just a few kg: not much larger than a large rat. You mention bird ancestors- the closest relatives like the velociraptors were larger than 20kg. But, by 65 myo birds themselves- recognizable to us as being like what we have to day- existed. This would include species that lived in water or near water.)
2. This new article suggests that only burrowing / nocturnal animals (mammals, small non-dinosaur reptiles like snakes) and animals that lived in swamps / water (birds, small species of crocodiles) survived. These two patterns put together can account for the survival patterns amoung classes / families of animals. Only the smallest dinosaurs (birds) survived- probably branching out from water-dwelling species. Mammals and other reptiles branched out from the nocturnal and/or burrowing species that survived. Everything large on land died. I would still wonder about the large ocean-dinosaurs (the ones that looked like dolphins). Perhaps their food supply was disrupted long enough (if the whole food chain was broken) for them to not make it. Sharks and crocodiles could be more versatile. But who knows... its an interesting theory that the article had, but it still needs much more corroboration: thats how science goes.
The extinction event killed off all species larger than about 20kg. That wouldn't have included any mammals. Mammals 65 million years ago were tiny (mice sized) and most likely nocturnal.
- One terrorist per 10 airplane flights
- several terrorists per large sporting event or rock concert
- 400 in Silicon Valley (although 30 were laid off and are moving back in w/ the parents)
So if there are that many terrorists floating about, they've got to be terribly incompetent ones. We should be swarming with terrorist events, shouldn't we? Even if they are all zombie terrorists, pinging the master to see when to go off, shouldn't at least 0.1% of them have gone off early? Leading to 1 terror event every three days? (assuming they are industrious and want to do one event per year)What happens to you if someone else has a similar name? From this article on the ACLU's No Fly List lawsuit:
Or from this article from 2003:"This week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon, confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and security checkpoints in the last year or so."
"Remember Ozzie and Harriet's son, David Nelson? "I got stopped at the John Wayne Airport" in Orange County, Calif., he said by phone from Los Angeles this week. "Two police officers knew who I was and tried to explain to the guy behind the security desk. It didn't faze him at all." Even as another officer was saying he had once met David's mother, Harriet, David was being instructed to remove his shoes, he says. "I asked, 'Does the guy on the list have a middle name of Ozzie?' He said, 'It just says David Nelson.' "
Why should any regular individual be worried about these systems? From the best essay on privacy and 9/11 laws I've seen (from the former privacy czar of Canada- warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans have already lost):
"...But there also will be tangible, specific harm. The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
"Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada...
" Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
"...When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that matters and that human rights such as privacy are a luxury. But such extremes can only reward and encourage terrorism, not diminish it. They can only devastate our lives, without commensurately safeguarding them. Of course we all want to be safe. But we could be safer from terrorism - perhaps - if we permanently evacuated all the high-rise office towers, if we closed down the subways, if we forever grounded all airplanes. Yet no reasonable person would be likely to argue for adopting such measures. We'd say, "We want to be safe, yes - but not at the price of sacrificing our whole way of life." The same reasoning should apply, in my view, to arguments that privacy should indiscriminately be sacrificed on the altar of enhanced security..."
Moller is a Davis (California) institution. The tourguides mentioned him and his "almost ready for launch car" when I was touring UCDavis to choose a school. And when I graduated. And when I visit my friends there. And when my now baby niece starts touring potential universities: I'm sure they'll still talk about how he's almost there.
Not that the evidence isn't also compatible with creators / designers... but those designers are not only plagarists, but very bad plagarists. Not only have they never surprised us with original code, the copies / plagarism also include copies of all previous copying errors (like the primates having an almost working- but for a few errors- version of vitamin C manufacturing. Yay scurvy: other mammals don't have to worry about it.)
As always, the talk.origins archive and website should have good info on this or related topics.
Supposedly the US believes that a person who freely joins a country is just as much a citizen as one born to the land (other than that not being a president clause). The behavior of the officials sending Arar to Syria says otherwise: this should frighten any naturalized US citizen. The US sending Arar to Syria was an expediency issue: they could outsource the extraordinary rendition(*) they wanted for Arar. His Syrian past was convenient to the US officials wanting to work on him. (*torture)
Here are links to 24 articles about Arar and his torture, and here is what his lawyers write
Unless, of course, the hunt itself makes you happy. I'm a frugal person myself (and recommend Usenet's misc.consumers.frugal-living). But I've had a couple of friends who took frugality too far - to the point where they were valuing their personal time at an epsilon above zero.
"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.
Anyways, its good to point out that for most Americans / most American history, we did work 10-12 hour days, 6 days a week, without much expectation of spending time with families, vacations, benefits, disability pay or the right to unionize.Many workers fought hard- many died (check out the early history of Pinkertons) for the right to ask for better working conditions.
If we're being asked to compete on the basis of education or simply on wage differentials, thats one thing. But with some of our competition we also have to compete against the loss of all the workplace rights fought for over generations in the US.
If you are driving you have to have ID with you, but you aren't required to have your name in machine readable type up on the dashboard.
Based on the 80 million for Q1 2004 (with expenses for that of 9 million, Q104). Google says that the margin for Google Network is lower than that of Google's own ads. But, as "We share most of the fees these ads generate with our Google Network members," some people are making some nice money with Google. Time to stop posting on Slashdot and start improving my own websites.
Back in 1999 the Foresight Institute released the first version of the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. . These guidelines, interestingly enough, ended up in the US Congresses' recent (2003) bill on Molecular manufacturing / nanontechnology studies.
One point that the F.I. makes that often gets missed in discussion of nano: molecular nanotechnology != self-replicating machines. As Eric Drexler writes: "Much has been made of a concern I raised in 1986, under the name "gray goo" -- a hypothetical scenario involving runaway replicators. Building fully self-replicating machines would be difficult, however, and building machines that could replicate without external help would be more difficult still. Current work in the field shows that it will be easier and more efficient to develop molecular manufacturing without building any self-replicating machines at all."
One measure of the existence or success of a field is the jobs available in it: jobs certainly exist in 2004. By 2014 it should be really interesting. Another measure is "does the field have its equivalent of Slashdot?" Yup, Nanodot.
The F.I.'s website has much good material: FAQs, Reviews of nano for the technical or non-technical reader, reviews of policy issues and more. In their policy section they discuss how to avoid high-tech terrorism: it involves more nano, not less. Another of their essays talks about 6 lessons from 9/11 that should be applied to molecular nanotechnology: