The same can be said of anything really. A plumber's work may benefit a family for the life of their house. Later plumbers can improve that work without any legal restrictions. OTOH, copyrighted work is untouchable for around a century.
I wonder if the 50,000 could work together to ensure that as many trials as possible overlap... Since the firm has a finite number of lawyers I'd imagine a good number of lawsuits would be dismissed when the plaintiff didn't show up. Or just ensure they all go to tedious trials and bank on the law firm not having the resources to fight a 50,000 front war.
Discovering that morality is localized is rather amazing. I wonder if this knowledge will eventually be used to determined how active that area is (fMRI?) to quantize a person's integrity. So, for example, to become a judge someone must score above a certain level. Or, more scarily, criminals might undergo forcible treatment to enhance this area. OTOH, this raises the question of whether someone has the right to be immoral or if we as a society can exclude the selfish "cheaters" that get ahead by being anti-social.
I'd imagine the first line of business would be to turn this into some pseudoscientific rubbish that an employer can use to vet job applicants. There's certainly precedent.
Personally, I prefer to use the best task for the job. I launch programs with the run prompt, navigate websites with the mouse, enter data into forms with the keyboard, manage small numbers of files spatially, and manage large numbers of files using commands.
You could use a hammer for everything, and save yourself the trouble of learning how to use multiple tools efficiently. It's certainly less work in the short term. Plus you provide everyone else with schadenfreude when you try to select a large subset of files with the mouse, or try to type out excessively long filenames with the keyboard.
For terminal lovers: I'm well aware of, and make much use of tab autocompletion. It doesn't work in all situations, and, even when it does, the mouse is a more efficient approach for certain common tasks.
The definition of a desert is low moisture, which subjects them to wide day/night temperature variation. Perhaps the OP could get away with not using the computer when it's especially hot outside (e.g. do computer work in the morning and evening).
Deductions exist to prevent a business from paying taxes on the same item multiple times. With a 40% tax rate, a four step manufacturing process would mean that 87% of the final price would go to taxes if deductions weren't allowed.
But, in any case, the effective federal tax rate is calculated at 25%, the minimum tax rate (few if any deductions are allowed) is 20%, and the US has the fifth largest corporate tax rate in the world. Combining state and federal, the business tax rate is something around 40%, which is the second highest in the world. This is compared with about 20% for Europe.
Fixing single gene defects, like color blindness, is like changing a bad capacitor. Big deal. A keyboard with a broken button isn't really valuable* to anyone (unless that broken key is caps lock and it's a gift).
Changing polygenic traits like height, IQ, sexual orientation, or predisposition to obesity is completely different. Those traits are a result of many genes interacting. Changing them would be like rewiring the whole circuit. Besides being technologically infeasible, the ethical issues apply particularly strongly here.
* I mean this as in the "trait" doesn't really enrich the person who has it, not that the person is worthless. I suppose color blind people see the world differently, but if they want this procedure then I see no reason to deny it to them.
You must remember that the US taxes businesses more than Europe does. So that's why some things are more expensive (think of it like a tax, just an indirect one). OTOH, the US does seem to focus more on efficiency of services than on raw quantity.
With 28% of the GDP collected as tax revenue the US maintains a very high standard of living. A country like Sweden has a higher standard (e.g. HDI), but IMHO they dip into diminishing returns by spending nearly 50% of their GDP to achieve that. Australia and Japan seem to have the best trade off, if HDI is to be believed.
Millions of computer users are idiots.
Ignorant != stupid. The difference is, there's a cure for ignorance, none for stupidity. But everyone is ignorant.
What, then, do you call persistent, willful ignorance despite repeated direct negative consequences?
wow.. that's one dumb thing "because it was misused once, 70 years ago
That information was denied until it was declassified just a few years ago and the 1940 census still won't be available for review until 2012. So "70 years ago" is the most recent information we have on how the census was used. Plus, the census claims that there are strong penalties for misusing the information, yet I've been unable to locate a single instance of this happening despite known historic abuses.
Epidemiologists care, but from what I've seen, clinicians are quite divided about that. It's true that race alters one's risk for many diseases. But family history is far more important, and IMHO a person's race isn't going to make any big differences in a differential diagnosis.
Patients don't seem to like being treated differently based on race either. The drug BiDil was a drug approved for black patients specifically, but it wasn't that successful for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the typical patient response of: "That's great doctor, but I'd really prefer the same medication that you give your white patients."
IMHO it's all a moot point. Race isn't biological, it's cultural. Sexual selection and isolation has historically kept certain genetic traits confined within certain races, but increased cultural interaction is rapidly changing how doctors use epidemiology information. It used to be that a US doctor would never see malaria, but with easy travel it's become something that they have to look for. Sickle cell anemia has been found in white patients, and it'd be quite rare to find someone with a "pure" race anywhere in the US (self reported races are getting more and more subjective).
What can we really do with racial information? Say we have a disease that is very rare in blacks. Can doctors be lazy and not even consider looking for it in that population? Can an insurance company say "we'll pay for the diagnostic test in whites, but not in blacks"? And diseases that are considerably more likely in a specific race are quite rare, the difference is usually uselessly minor. It's not like clinicians use Bayesian analysis to diagnose patients and, historically, medical software that uses that approach doesn't work.
Two reasons really. First, there's no such thing as the "obedience gene", the "selfish gene", the "criminal gene", or the "alcoholic gene", that's the media oversimplifying; it'd be like rewiring a single transistor in your computer and expecting it to add a feature to a specific program. Second, even if it were scientifically possible, there's no government that could pull it off, it'd be a massive project that'd go way over budget and be discovered when it fail spectacularly.
Very interesting about honey, although you did make an error. HFCS 55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, not sucrose. HFCS is made by enzymatically converting pure glucose (derived from corn) into a fructose/glucose mixture, then perhaps diluting it with the desired amount of pure glucose.
That said, having 22% more fructose than glucose still does everything attributed to HFCS. It'd be interesting to see if HFCS 42 behaves similarly to HFCS 55, since it's got 28% less fructose than glucose, and gets labeled as the same thing.
If the site relies on HTTP/1.1, as is the case when multiple domains are hosted from the same IP address, then it's not possible to access the site by IP alone. OTOH, any filter worth its salt would do a reverse DNS lookup on an unknown IP, which would reveal the single domain name for an HTTP 1.0 server, rendering this technique mostly useless for HTTP packet filtering.
Tricking HTTP proxy servers might work, if they allow CONNECT on port 80:
IMHO it's more likely that lying to someone who's more powerful than you is riskier and thus more stressful. Plus there's the whole boss ~= parent mental association that's bound to have some kind of effect.
(I'm rather curious as to whether that was an intentional reference to real-life technology that people think only existed in movies, or if it was just an amazing guess.)
While I was a student there were two cases of someone in my group of a dozen friends having a serious medical problem and being told that there weren't resources in American hospitals, despite their good health insurance, to treat them promptly enough to prevent permanent disability. Both went to India and received immediate care that successfully fixed their problems
As a medical student I may be a bit idealistic, but AFAIK this sort of thing should not be possible for about half a dozen reasons. What sort of illness did your friends have, and why was no doctor in the whole country willing to treat it?
You realize that the object is only 1 micrometer, and the cloak only 300nm
That doesn't seem very effective... I mean, I'm 1.67 m tall, so if I tried to wear a 50 cm invisibility cloak I suspect my floating head and disembodied legs would attract rather a lot of attention.
More often than not, doctors will charge double what they do with insurance companies for cash / self-pay people.
They'll often bill everyone identically, which means that insurance companies negotiate it down to about half. This is a carry-over from when insurance companies would pay a fixed portion (e.g. 100%) of the bill, so doctors would bill more in hopes of getting paid more. If you speak with your doctor then there's a pretty good chance they'll reduce the bill to whatever the insurance companies pay (or less, many doctors are charitable if you're uninsured due to economic hardship).
A couple years ago I heard a presentation about the intricacies of healthcare and the Amish. Apparently they (as in the local ones) don't believe in using insurance (no clue about how that'll fly if this bill passes). Instead, they pool their money and pay collectively whenever a member of the colony gets sick (they also use a lot of herbal medicine and don't go to "extremes" to keep people alive). One issue that came up was that they paid 100% of their bills, which was about twice that of what insurance companies paid. It became cheaper for them to pay for someone to drive them to another hospital a couple hours aways. Obviously the local hospital thought this was ridiculous and changed their policy. The problem was that nobody at the hospital really noticed until the Amish stopped showing up.
I asked this before, and everyone said something to the effect of "THERE ARE BILLIONS OF CHINESE" as a reason why Google should stay. But I'm still not seeing it.
China may have a lot of people but they aren't homogeneous. You have the wealthy coast and the rural interior (IIRC). According to Google (search) there are 111 million internet users in China. 70% apparently use Baidu, so Google's Chinese market is something like 33 million. A very large number still, but I suspect it's a minor part of Google's worldwide market.
Most times a mammal loses a limb, it's fatal. For the other times, a rapid recovery (scarring) is probably preferable to a slower one (regeneration) for a few reasons.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any social creature that regenerates. It's likely that regeneration's high energy demands would have a high price for a group. If they aren't closely related then it's better to exile that individual (so they die). If they are closely related then the risk of the whole group dieing probably outweighs the benefit.
Mammals have high energy needs relative to amphibians and reptiles even without regeneration. It's entirely possible that no mammal could eat enough to fuel the regeneration, especially while injured. So, rather than evolve slow regeneration (likely an "ideal" solution), it was "easier" to just turn it off entirely.
Mammals tend to be more intelligent (as a group). Perhaps scars have the benefit of reminding an animal (and any that it encounters) about their trauma, and teaches them to avoid it in the future. Losing a limb is the extreme, and regeneration probably has a greater effect on natural selection with just repairing minor injuries, where there might not be a significant advantage with full regeneration.
I'd hope we could do a lot better than the human immune system. It usually keeps us alive, but we get all kinds of infections and many persist for a lifetime. Also, there's a whole class of autoimmune diseases caused by false positives and even a normal immune system can easily overreact and kill a person (e.g. septic shock).
Current computers still do a lot better than most humans. Bacteria on the skin and in the gut outnumber our own cells ten to one. While many are beneficial, we don't really get any say in whether they're there or not, so the equivalent of a low impact botnet that prevents the installation of other botnets. A new computer might get infected in minutes on an open internet, but the number of infections is still an order of magnitude lower than how many illnesses a child will get.
You shouldn't get medical advice from a drunk dude in a bar, but people do it. My guess is that this group seeking medical advice on Twitter overlaps very nicely with the group of people most susceptible to medical advertising.
Perhaps the increase in frequency allows for greater throughput. IR is under 400 THz while visible light goes up to about 800 THz. Any higher and you risk eye damage with long term exposure (UV-A*), or DNA damage (UV-B, UV-C, and up). Visible light also isn't absorbed quite so much by the atmosphere.
* Technically, Green, Blue, Violet, and UV-A all cause eye damage over time. UV-A can cause DNA damage indirectly, and skin damage, but I'm assuming low intensity here.
Slashdot Mirror
The same can be said of anything really. A plumber's work may benefit a family for the life of their house. Later plumbers can improve that work without any legal restrictions. OTOH, copyrighted work is untouchable for around a century.
I wonder if the 50,000 could work together to ensure that as many trials as possible overlap... Since the firm has a finite number of lawyers I'd imagine a good number of lawsuits would be dismissed when the plaintiff didn't show up. Or just ensure they all go to tedious trials and bank on the law firm not having the resources to fight a 50,000 front war.
Discovering that morality is localized is rather amazing. I wonder if this knowledge will eventually be used to determined how active that area is (fMRI?) to quantize a person's integrity. So, for example, to become a judge someone must score above a certain level. Or, more scarily, criminals might undergo forcible treatment to enhance this area. OTOH, this raises the question of whether someone has the right to be immoral or if we as a society can exclude the selfish "cheaters" that get ahead by being anti-social.
I'd imagine the first line of business would be to turn this into some pseudoscientific rubbish that an employer can use to vet job applicants. There's certainly precedent.
Personally, I prefer to use the best task for the job. I launch programs with the run prompt, navigate websites with the mouse, enter data into forms with the keyboard, manage small numbers of files spatially, and manage large numbers of files using commands.
You could use a hammer for everything, and save yourself the trouble of learning how to use multiple tools efficiently. It's certainly less work in the short term. Plus you provide everyone else with schadenfreude when you try to select a large subset of files with the mouse, or try to type out excessively long filenames with the keyboard.
For terminal lovers: I'm well aware of, and make much use of tab autocompletion. It doesn't work in all situations, and, even when it does, the mouse is a more efficient approach for certain common tasks.
The definition of a desert is low moisture, which subjects them to wide day/night temperature variation. Perhaps the OP could get away with not using the computer when it's especially hot outside (e.g. do computer work in the morning and evening).
Deductions exist to prevent a business from paying taxes on the same item multiple times. With a 40% tax rate, a four step manufacturing process would mean that 87% of the final price would go to taxes if deductions weren't allowed.
But, in any case, the effective federal tax rate is calculated at 25%, the minimum tax rate (few if any deductions are allowed) is 20%, and the US has the fifth largest corporate tax rate in the world. Combining state and federal, the business tax rate is something around 40%, which is the second highest in the world. This is compared with about 20% for Europe.
Fixing single gene defects, like color blindness, is like changing a bad capacitor. Big deal. A keyboard with a broken button isn't really valuable* to anyone (unless that broken key is caps lock and it's a gift).
Changing polygenic traits like height, IQ, sexual orientation, or predisposition to obesity is completely different. Those traits are a result of many genes interacting. Changing them would be like rewiring the whole circuit. Besides being technologically infeasible, the ethical issues apply particularly strongly here.
* I mean this as in the "trait" doesn't really enrich the person who has it, not that the person is worthless. I suppose color blind people see the world differently, but if they want this procedure then I see no reason to deny it to them.
You must remember that the US taxes businesses more than Europe does. So that's why some things are more expensive (think of it like a tax, just an indirect one). OTOH, the US does seem to focus more on efficiency of services than on raw quantity.
With 28% of the GDP collected as tax revenue the US maintains a very high standard of living. A country like Sweden has a higher standard (e.g. HDI), but IMHO they dip into diminishing returns by spending nearly 50% of their GDP to achieve that. Australia and Japan seem to have the best trade off, if HDI is to be believed.
How about we do away with laws outlawing fraud via e-mail and cut out the middleman?
Millions of computer users are idiots. Ignorant != stupid. The difference is, there's a cure for ignorance, none for stupidity. But everyone is ignorant.
What, then, do you call persistent, willful ignorance despite repeated direct negative consequences?
wow.. that's one dumb thing "because it was misused once, 70 years ago
That information was denied until it was declassified just a few years ago and the 1940 census still won't be available for review until 2012. So "70 years ago" is the most recent information we have on how the census was used. Plus, the census claims that there are strong penalties for misusing the information, yet I've been unable to locate a single instance of this happening despite known historic abuses.
Epidemiologists care, but from what I've seen, clinicians are quite divided about that. It's true that race alters one's risk for many diseases. But family history is far more important, and IMHO a person's race isn't going to make any big differences in a differential diagnosis.
Patients don't seem to like being treated differently based on race either. The drug BiDil was a drug approved for black patients specifically, but it wasn't that successful for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the typical patient response of: "That's great doctor, but I'd really prefer the same medication that you give your white patients."
IMHO it's all a moot point. Race isn't biological, it's cultural. Sexual selection and isolation has historically kept certain genetic traits confined within certain races, but increased cultural interaction is rapidly changing how doctors use epidemiology information. It used to be that a US doctor would never see malaria, but with easy travel it's become something that they have to look for. Sickle cell anemia has been found in white patients, and it'd be quite rare to find someone with a "pure" race anywhere in the US (self reported races are getting more and more subjective).
What can we really do with racial information? Say we have a disease that is very rare in blacks. Can doctors be lazy and not even consider looking for it in that population? Can an insurance company say "we'll pay for the diagnostic test in whites, but not in blacks"? And diseases that are considerably more likely in a specific race are quite rare, the difference is usually uselessly minor. It's not like clinicians use Bayesian analysis to diagnose patients and, historically, medical software that uses that approach doesn't work.
Two reasons really. First, there's no such thing as the "obedience gene", the "selfish gene", the "criminal gene", or the "alcoholic gene", that's the media oversimplifying; it'd be like rewiring a single transistor in your computer and expecting it to add a feature to a specific program. Second, even if it were scientifically possible, there's no government that could pull it off, it'd be a massive project that'd go way over budget and be discovered when it fail spectacularly.
Very interesting about honey, although you did make an error. HFCS 55 is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, not sucrose. HFCS is made by enzymatically converting pure glucose (derived from corn) into a fructose/glucose mixture, then perhaps diluting it with the desired amount of pure glucose.
That said, having 22% more fructose than glucose still does everything attributed to HFCS. It'd be interesting to see if HFCS 42 behaves similarly to HFCS 55, since it's got 28% less fructose than glucose, and gets labeled as the same thing.
HTTP/1.0: /index.html HTTP/1.0
/index.html HTTP/1.1
/index.html HTTP/1.1
GET
HTTP/1.1:
GET
Host: example.org
If the site relies on HTTP/1.1, as is the case when multiple domains are hosted from the same IP address, then it's not possible to access the site by IP alone. OTOH, any filter worth its salt would do a reverse DNS lookup on an unknown IP, which would reveal the single domain name for an HTTP 1.0 server, rendering this technique mostly useless for HTTP packet filtering.
Tricking HTTP proxy servers might work, if they allow CONNECT on port 80:
CONNECT 2130706433:80 HTTP/1.1
GET
Host: example.geek
IMHO it's more likely that lying to someone who's more powerful than you is riskier and thus more stressful. Plus there's the whole boss ~= parent mental association that's bound to have some kind of effect.
Interesting, I was unaware that anyone was working on a Facebook filesystem. Now the only question is if the investigator was using the original FSN or the open source alternative.
(I'm rather curious as to whether that was an intentional reference to real-life technology that people think only existed in movies, or if it was just an amazing guess.)
While I was a student there were two cases of someone in my group of a dozen friends having a serious medical problem and being told that there weren't resources in American hospitals, despite their good health insurance, to treat them promptly enough to prevent permanent disability. Both went to India and received immediate care that successfully fixed their problems
As a medical student I may be a bit idealistic, but AFAIK this sort of thing should not be possible for about half a dozen reasons. What sort of illness did your friends have, and why was no doctor in the whole country willing to treat it?
You realize that the object is only 1 micrometer, and the cloak only 300nm
That doesn't seem very effective... I mean, I'm 1.67 m tall, so if I tried to wear a 50 cm invisibility cloak I suspect my floating head and disembodied legs would attract rather a lot of attention.
More often than not, doctors will charge double what they do with insurance companies for cash / self-pay people.
They'll often bill everyone identically, which means that insurance companies negotiate it down to about half. This is a carry-over from when insurance companies would pay a fixed portion (e.g. 100%) of the bill, so doctors would bill more in hopes of getting paid more. If you speak with your doctor then there's a pretty good chance they'll reduce the bill to whatever the insurance companies pay (or less, many doctors are charitable if you're uninsured due to economic hardship).
A couple years ago I heard a presentation about the intricacies of healthcare and the Amish. Apparently they (as in the local ones) don't believe in using insurance (no clue about how that'll fly if this bill passes). Instead, they pool their money and pay collectively whenever a member of the colony gets sick (they also use a lot of herbal medicine and don't go to "extremes" to keep people alive). One issue that came up was that they paid 100% of their bills, which was about twice that of what insurance companies paid. It became cheaper for them to pay for someone to drive them to another hospital a couple hours aways. Obviously the local hospital thought this was ridiculous and changed their policy. The problem was that nobody at the hospital really noticed until the Amish stopped showing up.
I asked this before, and everyone said something to the effect of "THERE ARE BILLIONS OF CHINESE" as a reason why Google should stay. But I'm still not seeing it.
China may have a lot of people but they aren't homogeneous. You have the wealthy coast and the rural interior (IIRC). According to Google (search) there are 111 million internet users in China. 70% apparently use Baidu, so Google's Chinese market is something like 33 million. A very large number still, but I suspect it's a minor part of Google's worldwide market.
Most times a mammal loses a limb, it's fatal. For the other times, a rapid recovery (scarring) is probably preferable to a slower one (regeneration) for a few reasons.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any social creature that regenerates. It's likely that regeneration's high energy demands would have a high price for a group. If they aren't closely related then it's better to exile that individual (so they die). If they are closely related then the risk of the whole group dieing probably outweighs the benefit.
Mammals have high energy needs relative to amphibians and reptiles even without regeneration. It's entirely possible that no mammal could eat enough to fuel the regeneration, especially while injured. So, rather than evolve slow regeneration (likely an "ideal" solution), it was "easier" to just turn it off entirely.
Mammals tend to be more intelligent (as a group). Perhaps scars have the benefit of reminding an animal (and any that it encounters) about their trauma, and teaches them to avoid it in the future. Losing a limb is the extreme, and regeneration probably has a greater effect on natural selection with just repairing minor injuries, where there might not be a significant advantage with full regeneration.
I'd hope we could do a lot better than the human immune system. It usually keeps us alive, but we get all kinds of infections and many persist for a lifetime. Also, there's a whole class of autoimmune diseases caused by false positives and even a normal immune system can easily overreact and kill a person (e.g. septic shock).
Current computers still do a lot better than most humans. Bacteria on the skin and in the gut outnumber our own cells ten to one. While many are beneficial, we don't really get any say in whether they're there or not, so the equivalent of a low impact botnet that prevents the installation of other botnets. A new computer might get infected in minutes on an open internet, but the number of infections is still an order of magnitude lower than how many illnesses a child will get.
You shouldn't get medical advice from a drunk dude in a bar, but people do it. My guess is that this group seeking medical advice on Twitter overlaps very nicely with the group of people most susceptible to medical advertising.
Obligatory XKCD.
Perhaps the increase in frequency allows for greater throughput. IR is under 400 THz while visible light goes up to about 800 THz. Any higher and you risk eye damage with long term exposure (UV-A*), or DNA damage (UV-B, UV-C, and up). Visible light also isn't absorbed quite so much by the atmosphere.
* Technically, Green, Blue, Violet, and UV-A all cause eye damage over time. UV-A can cause DNA damage indirectly, and skin damage, but I'm assuming low intensity here.