Most people in a bad situation (e.g. financially) realize that having another kid rarely, if ever, improves it, hence it's not an intelligent thing to do. Furthermore, while bad luck can put anybody in a bad situation, intelligence is a major factor in getting out of it.
That said, "bad situation" is relative and we're far better off than people were historically, and high intelligence isn't strongly linked to genetics. Low intelligence can be, but higher intelligence is more a function of derived epigentic effects (thus a step or three away from direct natural selection) and upbringing (not the binary "good" or "bad", more how your environment affects you -- some people thrive in adversity and become dull with privilege).
Exactly. If I'm looking for something using Google, it's quite rare for a single webpage to completely answer my question. It's also intellectually lazy to quit your research after reading a single source.
IMHO, this comic illustrates this point nicely. (That's assuming a perfect Question -> Answer AI, which probably won't be possible for decades.)
You seem to be thinking of mild depression or even subclinical sadness. This is quite common, as psychiatric disorders tend to be an exaggeration of normal things that everyone feels, so it's easy to underestimate them. You also rarely see them, as holding a job and going out requires a fair degree of psychological health. The last hundred years or so of medical research specifically tests for effectiveness VS a placebo, so it's not like people are just shooting in the dark here. (To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.) Most of the people I've talked to keep struggling with depression throughout their life and getting treatment means getting better in weeks/months rather than years.
Also, stop getting your medical knowledge from TV, it's wrong. The vast majority of psychologists don't do the couch thing anymore. Plus, CBT (the most common type) isn't really talking about one's feelings at length. If I remember my history right, that sort of therapy died out as psychology progressed beyond Freud. There are likely a few psychologists that still do it, but they cater to rich people with similar misconceptions (it requires almost weekly visits for years before you see significant results -- assuming the psychologist doesn't incorporate newer forms of therapy).
OTOH, we would probably fire a safe designer if a 15 year old could easily open it without the combination. Similar to how someone in charge of physical security would be terminated if 15 year olds could non-destructively enter the building as they pleased.
The grandparent didn't say we eat meat because we evolved to, he said we eat meat because our body is configured to eat meat. To make an absurd analogy, just because we evolved to breath oxygen doesn't mean we have to breath oxygen, or even that we should.
In other words, a naturalistic argument would be that we should eat meat because we evolved to and have always done so. The GP argued that we should eat meat because that's what our bodies are built to do. Such an argument implies it's healthier to do so, but it's not incontrovertible (supported - yes, proven - no).
If you want a more formal example, look at our lipoprotein enzymes. They work much better with saturated ("animal") fats, leading to larger LDL sizes. Unsaturated fats lead to smaller LDL sizes. High levels of either are bad, but the smaller ones get stuck in blood vessels more easily, counteracting the benefit of lower absolute levels. Hence the probable reason why traditional Eskimo diets (99% meat) lead to lower cardiovascular disease than modern diets, and why the Atkins diet works. (Meat-derived omega fats, and such also have an effect.)
Saturated Fat is an interesting topic to compare to AGW. There's a lot more scientific controversy (e.g. the last big meta-analysis) but public consensus. The science behind the two is similarly difficult to study. In nutrition, you can't do randomized controlled clinical trials in humans for 30-40 years to measure the health effects, just as you can't do direct RCTs in climatology. So, the science isn't terribly strong behind either, hence why there's controversy. Plus they're both overly-politicized.
Eugenics is a junk science because nobody dared advance it since WWII while other fields have advanced to the point that it seems ridiculous in comparison. There's a real basis for it, since humans aren't 100% nurture, but it's now reprehensible to say that people are not equal.
Realistically, people just tried to conflate race with genetics to justify their racism with science. The reality is that humans are far too promiscuous, so we display very little genetic variation between various groups. (Our total population also bottle-necked a few times, leading to extensive cross-breeding.) Humans differ by only 0.5% genetically, which is similar to dogs. However, human populations only account for 5.4% of that difference, while dog breed counts for 27.5%. Also, when left to their own devices, both humans and dogs create mutts at very high frequency.
There's also the problem that whoever was harking on eugenics believed that their group/race was superior, when genetics doesn't seem to work like that in humans. Genetic defects are real, but genetic superiority is a racist fantasy. There's no super-intelligence gene, but plenty of things that can go wrong and give a person a low IQ.
Most pre-meds go on to do something unrelated to medicine. The acceptance rate to medical school is quite low, especially when people looked to medicine as a "guaranteed job" during uncertain economic times. In my undergraduate class, there were roughly 400 pre-meds initially, ~10 went to the affiliated medical school, and ~10 went to other medical schools. Even a single bad grade will dramatically worsen one's odds, hence why so many pre-meds succumb to the temptation of cheating.
Research is similar, because grants & funding are also stupidly competitive. This drives people to behave unethically as a calculated risk. Even well-intentioned people lose their objectivity when they dedicate their careers to something, and unobjective science is an oxymoron.
I had my (Visa logo) check card compromised on Feb 12th, and this seems like the most logical mechanism behind it. For me, what it entailed was a call to my cell phone from my bank at 10:00 am concerning a 7:00 am charge of $7 in another state. The charge was never authorized and I was sent a new card within the week. My own review of my account and credit history revealed no further anomalies.
That was perhaps my second or third call from them in the past eight years, so they're frighteningly accurate at knowing what is and what is not a typical charge for me. All that said, I expected headaches since fraudulent use of a check card involves "my" money rather than theirs, but the process was rather painless for me.
Yes, they no longer exist. That does not preclude comparing the current market leader to the past market leader. Google and Doubleclick differ substantially, hence why Google dominated and bought them despite being a latecomer to the market.
"Playing"? Sorry, I was trying to have an intellectual discussion, which is cooperative, not competitive. It's not "winning" if you give nothing but assertions and steadily decline in civility until people stop talking to you.
Pegging Google as an ad company is overly simplistic. It doesn't allow you to adequately predict the range of Google's actions, thus it's not a useful classification (beyond rhetoric). It also leaves you vulnerable if they ever pose a threat, since targeted advertising is far less sinister than many of the things they could do.
Collecting "we know what you like to do" data is much more consistent with their mission statement and allocation of resources than with the actions of any ad company. Look at a company like Doubleclick if you're having trouble seeing the difference. You cannot reduce their actions to a simple "they want to sell our eyeballs to advertisers", for if that were true, they'd be one of the most random and inefficient companies of all time, which their track record disagrees with.
Not all of Google's offerings have ads, nor did their initial product have ads. What Google started as, and creates most of their products through, is finding, processing, and compiling data. It's the common factor from search to AI driven cars. Most of Google's products make no sense for an advertising company and most ad companies don't even have consumer facing web services. They make perfect sense for the development of search algorithms though.
A chemical company might make most of its money through a specific chemical (e.g. bleach), but it's not too difficult for them to switch if the need arises. Likewise, Google makes most of its money through ads, but their real asset is a vast collection of data and the programming talent to use it. They do ads, but that's an application of their core business. IMHO, that's why they now dominate internet advertising despite not being the first to market. Being overspecialized makes you vulnerable.
Well, most cells in the body work better when they're in the "not-eaten" state, so I'd venture to guess "all of them".
"Do not eat" is an oversimplification, but the "eating" refers to your immune cells destroying things that aren't supposed to be in the body. For example, bacteria lack CD47, so they get eaten by phagocytes. Your kidneys have CD47 so the immune system generally leaves them alone. If your CD47 membrane proteins all magically disappeared, your immune system would try to destroy nearly every cell in your body. If we didn't have CD47, then it'd be harder to tell what is and what is not supposed to be in the body. It's part of the immune system's IFF.
Cancer cells are rapidly mutating versions of your own cells. They already have CD47 and other membrane proteins, so the immune system has a tough time with them. That said, there are a large number of checks the immune system does, and many of the anti-viral checks (e.g. present random fragments of internal proteins for examination) also cause an early cancer to be eliminated (probably happens all the time). It's a delicate balance, because an "auto-immune" disease is what happens when your immune system errs on the side of killing something it shouldn't, and an infection or cancer is when it errs on the side of not-killing something it should.
Which is a more relevant way of pinning a word on a company: naming them after their most profitable product, or naming them based on how they create their products?
If you have a rooted phone and use gingerbread, then try PDroid. It allows you to send a blank, random, or custom value to those applications, which prevents a poorly written application from crashing. It's essentially the same feature that CyanogenMod rejected (IMHO, clearly demonstrating where their loyalties lie).
Unobtanium is a physics/engineering joke, and placeholder term for a material with highly desirable properties but doesn't actually exist. It's a rather common term, and I found it an appropriate and amusing name for the movie's MacGuffin. If you pay attention, it's obviously a room temperature superconductor (Meissner effect), and it's rather common to call such a material unobtanium. Also, it's a literary device, since it proves to be unobtainable.
In the movie, the humans never wanted to exterminate the inhabitants. They just wanted to mine unobtanium, and were likely just equipped for that. They hired mercenaries to protect the miners, but were not affiliated with any military, and thus unlikely to have access to weapons of mass destruction. I also doubt they were permitted to do much against the navi, and likely suffered legal consequences when they returned to Earth. That said, since it's obvious there'll be a sequel, the humans will be bombing the navi again for some contrived reason.
Generally, people with allergies avoid "fish", not "pacific bluefin tuna", and wouldn't try to eat atlantic bluefin tuna (conservation status of the two aside). It'd actually be rather dangerous to do the trials to determine exactly what is safe and what isn't.
It being fraud is absolutely true. OTOH, personally I wouldn't care if I got "Salmon or similar" so long as it's tasty and safe to eat. Overfishing a specific species for no reason beyond marketing is stupid but profitable. OTOH, when pufferfish gets substituted for salmon, that's bad.
You could likely cool your high temperature superconductor to nearly absolute zero (thus over a hundred kelvin of leeway), then encase it in aerogel or some similarly powerful insulator (vacuum?). This setup should last long enough for mobile applications of this technology.
Of course, if you have the resources and knowledge to implement this, just build a death ray and shoot down the plane. I don't have any idea why people keep thinking of ridiculous ways around TSA agents and security theater checkpoints. What's next, evading the Wal-Mart greeter?
It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Did a "denier" post this article? Or can we accept that there are a large number of idiots in both camps?
What I buy at the grocery store, or what movie I go see, or what restaurant I eat at, etc. is nobody's business but mine.
The government disagrees, and they're better armed. So long as we have taxes they will insist on intruding into your finances. Similarly, the police have grown accustomed to using financial information to solve crimes. Even corporations have seen the profitability of mining that data. None of these entities have any interest in reducing their power, and they alone are in the position to create, enforce, or fund the law. Thus, your notion of privacy (which I agree with) is rendered moot.
"Shouldn't be" is subjective. We can all think of scenerios where breaking the law is the right thing to do. I doubt anyone would argue that "drugs" are a such a worthy cause. Either way, if you break the law for some noble reason, you should also accept the consequences. Arguing the law is unjust is fine, open civil disobedience is admirable, but showing blatant disregard for the law and misconstruing privacy as your right to do so is disguising on a number of levels.
IMHO, you can potentially cut out a lot more, albeit it's obviously your choice as to how minimalistic to be...
I travel for business (so that's two cards), - Are you doing so right now? If not then don't carry them. If so, keep them in your suit, briefcase, or what-have-you.
have a joint account for household expenses (one card) a credit card for personal use (another card) - If you wish to keep separate accounts, you can just transfer funds online. Or just carry the joint card when you plan to make such a purchase.
and a debit card which I use the most (another card). - First of all, a debit card combines the worst features of checks and credit cards, and it's the least accept common method of payment. If it's stolen your whole bank account is at risk, and there are generally no incentives (e.g. cash back) to use one. Any merchant who accepts credit cards cannot give you a discount for debit cards like they can for cash. Second, pick one card and stick with it. If you frequently use ATMs, then I'd advise planning ahead a bit better, and keeping enough reserve cash for incidentals. As a bonus, your bank account won't be cleaned out by a skimmer or mugger.
a driver's license - Which is your license to operate a motor vehicle. Keep it in said vehicle. The US does not require you to carry your papers with you, as we presume you have a license to exist. Note that if you look hispanic and live in the southwest, constitutional protections may not be applied to you.
and health insurance cards... Plural? That sounds excessive. While it's not a bad idea since you never know when you'll be taken unconscious to an ER, you can copy that information to a piece of paper if you want to cut-down on wallet thickness and just take the physical card with you to the doctor. Also, being insured doesn't change your initial treatment, so it's not strictly necessary to carry your insurance card.
I suspect you forgot your shopping loyalty cards, business cards, reminders, social security card, and other items, the bulk of which require an over-sized, two-inch-thick-while-empty wallet.
Personally, I switched to a combined phone case / wallet that clips to my belt. I carry my driver's license (pointless but there's room), health insurance card (paper thin, not plastic), Google one-time authorization codes (paper), a credit card, and one bill to cover most any single debt that I might incur. That leaves one space so I can temporarily carry HID and ID cards. That said, my needs are not the same as yours. I have to be minimalistic as I often need to unexpectedly change into (pocketless) scrubs, and almost invariably am forced to leave my stuff in an unlocked locker (or pile), so my current system works well for me.
It depends on how you count. Read a list of these suicides. Notice how they're all in or directly outside the factory. People that go home to commit suicide, or become depressed so their output drops and they get fired, aren't counted in those figures. The rate of 13.9 is also for the population at large, not the demographics of Foxconn. For example, people at very high risk of suicide are not likely to be employed for very long at Foxconn (e.g. substance abusers [10 - 14 times more likely in the US], doctors [20 - 60 times], elderly alcoholic veteran widowers [>1000 times]).
If you want to compare apples to apples, look at a comparable company. McDonalds has almost the same number of employees as Foxconn. I do not believe that, every month, a worker publicly kills themself inside the restaurant. (Also, with counting, how many people are stopped from killing themselves by their fellow workers in the densely packed factory?) Most suicidal people attempt suicide in private, rather than trying to publicly shame their employer.
BTW, trying to figure out suicide rates in China in enough detail to account for these factors is next to impossible. The Chinese government controls that information, just like any information that might cast the government or one of its major industries in a negative light.
Well, a big problem with this requirement is that DNA isn't sequenced for identification. That's far too expensive (for now), but would allow for accurate identification excluding mosaics and twins (the former is likely underestimated in frequency since it's rarely relevant outside of this sort of analysis).
The traditional method is to chop DNA at known uncommon sequences so you get several pieces, run them on a gel that separates them according to size, and see if the sizes and number of fragments match-up. This works because humans have a few variable length repeats that vary in size and change with each generation (an over-simplification, e.g. the repeats often expand if the mother has the gene but not the father). Modern DNA analysis is a bit more sophisticated, but the underlying principle is the same.
So, how frequent are false positives? In an analysis of Arizona's 65,000 inmates researchers found 122 9/13 matches, 20 10/13, 1 11/13, and 1 12/13. Some of these were relatives but it's hard to say how many given the study was anonymous. So, it's a low rate but not low enough to use as police would like. I'm sure it'd be very easy to find some DNA at a crime scene, run the DNA search, find one person that matches and lives in the area, and arrest them for the crime.
It's hard to argue that it's a false positive if you live a block from the crime scene and fit the physical description, but merely because people don't understand statistics very well. (E.g. if it turned out to be an 80 year old Chinese lady and not a 20-ish Black guy that resembled the description, then nobody would arrest her.) And, prosecutors are going to argue the one in 108 billion theoretic odds, without any deeper understanding of the statistics and genetics that make false positives more likely.
Setting aside, for a moment, that I have tons of non-genetics issues with such a law, I must say this is premature. In a few years we'll be able to cheaply sequence DNA and have far more accurate identifications. Furthermore, we may be able to find genes and such that make violent behavior more likely, thus aiding research. So it's illogical to adopt this technology now rather than when it actually works well in a few years. It's not like the military immediately started commissioning Wright flyers as bombers and scouts.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people in a bad situation (e.g. financially) realize that having another kid rarely, if ever, improves it, hence it's not an intelligent thing to do. Furthermore, while bad luck can put anybody in a bad situation, intelligence is a major factor in getting out of it.
That said, "bad situation" is relative and we're far better off than people were historically, and high intelligence isn't strongly linked to genetics. Low intelligence can be, but higher intelligence is more a function of derived epigentic effects (thus a step or three away from direct natural selection) and upbringing (not the binary "good" or "bad", more how your environment affects you -- some people thrive in adversity and become dull with privilege).
Exactly. If I'm looking for something using Google, it's quite rare for a single webpage to completely answer my question. It's also intellectually lazy to quit your research after reading a single source.
IMHO, this comic illustrates this point nicely. (That's assuming a perfect Question -> Answer AI, which probably won't be possible for decades.)
You seem to be thinking of mild depression or even subclinical sadness. This is quite common, as psychiatric disorders tend to be an exaggeration of normal things that everyone feels, so it's easy to underestimate them. You also rarely see them, as holding a job and going out requires a fair degree of psychological health. The last hundred years or so of medical research specifically tests for effectiveness VS a placebo, so it's not like people are just shooting in the dark here. (To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.) Most of the people I've talked to keep struggling with depression throughout their life and getting treatment means getting better in weeks/months rather than years.
Also, stop getting your medical knowledge from TV, it's wrong. The vast majority of psychologists don't do the couch thing anymore. Plus, CBT (the most common type) isn't really talking about one's feelings at length. If I remember my history right, that sort of therapy died out as psychology progressed beyond Freud. There are likely a few psychologists that still do it, but they cater to rich people with similar misconceptions (it requires almost weekly visits for years before you see significant results -- assuming the psychologist doesn't incorporate newer forms of therapy).
OTOH, we would probably fire a safe designer if a 15 year old could easily open it without the combination. Similar to how someone in charge of physical security would be terminated if 15 year olds could non-destructively enter the building as they pleased.
The grandparent didn't say we eat meat because we evolved to, he said we eat meat because our body is configured to eat meat. To make an absurd analogy, just because we evolved to breath oxygen doesn't mean we have to breath oxygen, or even that we should.
In other words, a naturalistic argument would be that we should eat meat because we evolved to and have always done so. The GP argued that we should eat meat because that's what our bodies are built to do. Such an argument implies it's healthier to do so, but it's not incontrovertible (supported - yes, proven - no).
If you want a more formal example, look at our lipoprotein enzymes. They work much better with saturated ("animal") fats, leading to larger LDL sizes. Unsaturated fats lead to smaller LDL sizes. High levels of either are bad, but the smaller ones get stuck in blood vessels more easily, counteracting the benefit of lower absolute levels. Hence the probable reason why traditional Eskimo diets (99% meat) lead to lower cardiovascular disease than modern diets, and why the Atkins diet works. (Meat-derived omega fats, and such also have an effect.)
Saturated Fat is an interesting topic to compare to AGW. There's a lot more scientific controversy (e.g. the last big meta-analysis) but public consensus. The science behind the two is similarly difficult to study. In nutrition, you can't do randomized controlled clinical trials in humans for 30-40 years to measure the health effects, just as you can't do direct RCTs in climatology. So, the science isn't terribly strong behind either, hence why there's controversy. Plus they're both overly-politicized.
Eugenics is a junk science because nobody dared advance it since WWII while other fields have advanced to the point that it seems ridiculous in comparison. There's a real basis for it, since humans aren't 100% nurture, but it's now reprehensible to say that people are not equal.
Realistically, people just tried to conflate race with genetics to justify their racism with science. The reality is that humans are far too promiscuous, so we display very little genetic variation between various groups. (Our total population also bottle-necked a few times, leading to extensive cross-breeding.) Humans differ by only 0.5% genetically, which is similar to dogs. However, human populations only account for 5.4% of that difference, while dog breed counts for 27.5%. Also, when left to their own devices, both humans and dogs create mutts at very high frequency.
There's also the problem that whoever was harking on eugenics believed that their group/race was superior, when genetics doesn't seem to work like that in humans. Genetic defects are real, but genetic superiority is a racist fantasy. There's no super-intelligence gene, but plenty of things that can go wrong and give a person a low IQ.
Most pre-meds go on to do something unrelated to medicine. The acceptance rate to medical school is quite low, especially when people looked to medicine as a "guaranteed job" during uncertain economic times. In my undergraduate class, there were roughly 400 pre-meds initially, ~10 went to the affiliated medical school, and ~10 went to other medical schools. Even a single bad grade will dramatically worsen one's odds, hence why so many pre-meds succumb to the temptation of cheating.
Research is similar, because grants & funding are also stupidly competitive. This drives people to behave unethically as a calculated risk. Even well-intentioned people lose their objectivity when they dedicate their careers to something, and unobjective science is an oxymoron.
I had my (Visa logo) check card compromised on Feb 12th, and this seems like the most logical mechanism behind it. For me, what it entailed was a call to my cell phone from my bank at 10:00 am concerning a 7:00 am charge of $7 in another state. The charge was never authorized and I was sent a new card within the week. My own review of my account and credit history revealed no further anomalies.
That was perhaps my second or third call from them in the past eight years, so they're frighteningly accurate at knowing what is and what is not a typical charge for me. All that said, I expected headaches since fraudulent use of a check card involves "my" money rather than theirs, but the process was rather painless for me.
You're much more than an optimist than me if you did that and expected to still get mail service and pizza deliveries.
Yes, they no longer exist. That does not preclude comparing the current market leader to the past market leader. Google and Doubleclick differ substantially, hence why Google dominated and bought them despite being a latecomer to the market.
"Playing"? Sorry, I was trying to have an intellectual discussion, which is cooperative, not competitive. It's not "winning" if you give nothing but assertions and steadily decline in civility until people stop talking to you.
Pegging Google as an ad company is overly simplistic. It doesn't allow you to adequately predict the range of Google's actions, thus it's not a useful classification (beyond rhetoric). It also leaves you vulnerable if they ever pose a threat, since targeted advertising is far less sinister than many of the things they could do.
Collecting "we know what you like to do" data is much more consistent with their mission statement and allocation of resources than with the actions of any ad company. Look at a company like Doubleclick if you're having trouble seeing the difference. You cannot reduce their actions to a simple "they want to sell our eyeballs to advertisers", for if that were true, they'd be one of the most random and inefficient companies of all time, which their track record disagrees with.
Google Health, Bookmarks, Checkout, Contacts, Code, Docs, Latitude, Wallet, Play, Notebook, Reader, Sites...
Not all of Google's offerings have ads, nor did their initial product have ads. What Google started as, and creates most of their products through, is finding, processing, and compiling data. It's the common factor from search to AI driven cars. Most of Google's products make no sense for an advertising company and most ad companies don't even have consumer facing web services. They make perfect sense for the development of search algorithms though.
A chemical company might make most of its money through a specific chemical (e.g. bleach), but it's not too difficult for them to switch if the need arises. Likewise, Google makes most of its money through ads, but their real asset is a vast collection of data and the programming talent to use it. They do ads, but that's an application of their core business. IMHO, that's why they now dominate internet advertising despite not being the first to market. Being overspecialized makes you vulnerable.
Well, most cells in the body work better when they're in the "not-eaten" state, so I'd venture to guess "all of them".
"Do not eat" is an oversimplification, but the "eating" refers to your immune cells destroying things that aren't supposed to be in the body. For example, bacteria lack CD47, so they get eaten by phagocytes. Your kidneys have CD47 so the immune system generally leaves them alone. If your CD47 membrane proteins all magically disappeared, your immune system would try to destroy nearly every cell in your body. If we didn't have CD47, then it'd be harder to tell what is and what is not supposed to be in the body. It's part of the immune system's IFF.
Cancer cells are rapidly mutating versions of your own cells. They already have CD47 and other membrane proteins, so the immune system has a tough time with them. That said, there are a large number of checks the immune system does, and many of the anti-viral checks (e.g. present random fragments of internal proteins for examination) also cause an early cancer to be eliminated (probably happens all the time). It's a delicate balance, because an "auto-immune" disease is what happens when your immune system errs on the side of killing something it shouldn't, and an infection or cancer is when it errs on the side of not-killing something it should.
Which is a more relevant way of pinning a word on a company: naming them after their most profitable product, or naming them based on how they create their products?
If you have a rooted phone and use gingerbread, then try PDroid. It allows you to send a blank, random, or custom value to those applications, which prevents a poorly written application from crashing. It's essentially the same feature that CyanogenMod rejected (IMHO, clearly demonstrating where their loyalties lie).
Unobtanium is a physics/engineering joke, and placeholder term for a material with highly desirable properties but doesn't actually exist. It's a rather common term, and I found it an appropriate and amusing name for the movie's MacGuffin. If you pay attention, it's obviously a room temperature superconductor (Meissner effect), and it's rather common to call such a material unobtanium. Also, it's a literary device, since it proves to be unobtainable.
In the movie, the humans never wanted to exterminate the inhabitants. They just wanted to mine unobtanium, and were likely just equipped for that. They hired mercenaries to protect the miners, but were not affiliated with any military, and thus unlikely to have access to weapons of mass destruction. I also doubt they were permitted to do much against the navi, and likely suffered legal consequences when they returned to Earth. That said, since it's obvious there'll be a sequel, the humans will be bombing the navi again for some contrived reason.
Persistent and with ridiculous spatial memory and processing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWU0bfo-bSY
Generally, people with allergies avoid "fish", not "pacific bluefin tuna", and wouldn't try to eat atlantic bluefin tuna (conservation status of the two aside). It'd actually be rather dangerous to do the trials to determine exactly what is safe and what isn't.
It being fraud is absolutely true. OTOH, personally I wouldn't care if I got "Salmon or similar" so long as it's tasty and safe to eat. Overfishing a specific species for no reason beyond marketing is stupid but profitable. OTOH, when pufferfish gets substituted for salmon, that's bad.
You could likely cool your high temperature superconductor to nearly absolute zero (thus over a hundred kelvin of leeway), then encase it in aerogel or some similarly powerful insulator (vacuum?). This setup should last long enough for mobile applications of this technology.
Of course, if you have the resources and knowledge to implement this, just build a death ray and shoot down the plane. I don't have any idea why people keep thinking of ridiculous ways around TSA agents and security theater checkpoints. What's next, evading the Wal-Mart greeter?
It's the deniers who, every goddamned winter, come out of the woodwork with their childlike taunts: "If the Earth's getting warmer, then why is it currently cold outside!?"
Did a "denier" post this article? Or can we accept that there are a large number of idiots in both camps?
What I buy at the grocery store, or what movie I go see, or what restaurant I eat at, etc. is nobody's business but mine.
The government disagrees, and they're better armed. So long as we have taxes they will insist on intruding into your finances. Similarly, the police have grown accustomed to using financial information to solve crimes. Even corporations have seen the profitability of mining that data. None of these entities have any interest in reducing their power, and they alone are in the position to create, enforce, or fund the law. Thus, your notion of privacy (which I agree with) is rendered moot.
"Shouldn't be" is subjective. We can all think of scenerios where breaking the law is the right thing to do. I doubt anyone would argue that "drugs" are a such a worthy cause. Either way, if you break the law for some noble reason, you should also accept the consequences. Arguing the law is unjust is fine, open civil disobedience is admirable, but showing blatant disregard for the law and misconstruing privacy as your right to do so is disguising on a number of levels.
I've cut back as much as I can,
IMHO, you can potentially cut out a lot more, albeit it's obviously your choice as to how minimalistic to be...
I travel for business (so that's two cards), - Are you doing so right now? If not then don't carry them. If so, keep them in your suit, briefcase, or what-have-you.
have a joint account for household expenses (one card) a credit card for personal use (another card) - If you wish to keep separate accounts, you can just transfer funds online. Or just carry the joint card when you plan to make such a purchase.
and a debit card which I use the most (another card). - First of all, a debit card combines the worst features of checks and credit cards, and it's the least accept common method of payment. If it's stolen your whole bank account is at risk, and there are generally no incentives (e.g. cash back) to use one. Any merchant who accepts credit cards cannot give you a discount for debit cards like they can for cash. Second, pick one card and stick with it. If you frequently use ATMs, then I'd advise planning ahead a bit better, and keeping enough reserve cash for incidentals. As a bonus, your bank account won't be cleaned out by a skimmer or mugger.
a driver's license - Which is your license to operate a motor vehicle. Keep it in said vehicle. The US does not require you to carry your papers with you, as we presume you have a license to exist. Note that if you look hispanic and live in the southwest, constitutional protections may not be applied to you.
and health insurance cards... Plural? That sounds excessive. While it's not a bad idea since you never know when you'll be taken unconscious to an ER, you can copy that information to a piece of paper if you want to cut-down on wallet thickness and just take the physical card with you to the doctor. Also, being insured doesn't change your initial treatment, so it's not strictly necessary to carry your insurance card.
I suspect you forgot your shopping loyalty cards, business cards, reminders, social security card, and other items, the bulk of which require an over-sized, two-inch-thick-while-empty wallet.
Personally, I switched to a combined phone case / wallet that clips to my belt. I carry my driver's license (pointless but there's room), health insurance card (paper thin, not plastic), Google one-time authorization codes (paper), a credit card, and one bill to cover most any single debt that I might incur. That leaves one space so I can temporarily carry HID and ID cards. That said, my needs are not the same as yours. I have to be minimalistic as I often need to unexpectedly change into (pocketless) scrubs, and almost invariably am forced to leave my stuff in an unlocked locker (or pile), so my current system works well for me.
It depends on how you count. Read a list of these suicides. Notice how they're all in or directly outside the factory. People that go home to commit suicide, or become depressed so their output drops and they get fired, aren't counted in those figures. The rate of 13.9 is also for the population at large, not the demographics of Foxconn. For example, people at very high risk of suicide are not likely to be employed for very long at Foxconn (e.g. substance abusers [10 - 14 times more likely in the US], doctors [20 - 60 times], elderly alcoholic veteran widowers [>1000 times]).
If you want to compare apples to apples, look at a comparable company. McDonalds has almost the same number of employees as Foxconn. I do not believe that, every month, a worker publicly kills themself inside the restaurant. (Also, with counting, how many people are stopped from killing themselves by their fellow workers in the densely packed factory?) Most suicidal people attempt suicide in private, rather than trying to publicly shame their employer.
BTW, trying to figure out suicide rates in China in enough detail to account for these factors is next to impossible. The Chinese government controls that information, just like any information that might cast the government or one of its major industries in a negative light.
Well, a big problem with this requirement is that DNA isn't sequenced for identification. That's far too expensive (for now), but would allow for accurate identification excluding mosaics and twins (the former is likely underestimated in frequency since it's rarely relevant outside of this sort of analysis).
The traditional method is to chop DNA at known uncommon sequences so you get several pieces, run them on a gel that separates them according to size, and see if the sizes and number of fragments match-up. This works because humans have a few variable length repeats that vary in size and change with each generation (an over-simplification, e.g. the repeats often expand if the mother has the gene but not the father). Modern DNA analysis is a bit more sophisticated, but the underlying principle is the same.
So, how frequent are false positives? In an analysis of Arizona's 65,000 inmates researchers found 122 9/13 matches, 20 10/13, 1 11/13, and 1 12/13. Some of these were relatives but it's hard to say how many given the study was anonymous. So, it's a low rate but not low enough to use as police would like. I'm sure it'd be very easy to find some DNA at a crime scene, run the DNA search, find one person that matches and lives in the area, and arrest them for the crime.
It's hard to argue that it's a false positive if you live a block from the crime scene and fit the physical description, but merely because people don't understand statistics very well. (E.g. if it turned out to be an 80 year old Chinese lady and not a 20-ish Black guy that resembled the description, then nobody would arrest her.) And, prosecutors are going to argue the one in 108 billion theoretic odds, without any deeper understanding of the statistics and genetics that make false positives more likely.
Setting aside, for a moment, that I have tons of non-genetics issues with such a law, I must say this is premature. In a few years we'll be able to cheaply sequence DNA and have far more accurate identifications. Furthermore, we may be able to find genes and such that make violent behavior more likely, thus aiding research. So it's illogical to adopt this technology now rather than when it actually works well in a few years. It's not like the military immediately started commissioning Wright flyers as bombers and scouts.