Isn't using Vista for those reasons a bit like being really proud of the great big bolted gate that is sure to keep intruders away, while your fence consists of grass and your house is next to the ultramodern nuclear bunker with built in natural habitat simulation that you have free access to and is frequented by hot women?
I submit to you that if we were to learn everything there is to know about everything, we would become Gods.
This is an interesting subject. A good opportunity to expand upon what the phrase 'god' means. Saying that god is an all powerful supernatural being doesn't really say much. Surely in order to claim all powerful, we need to define in what way is god powerful, to differentiate between 'infinitely smart' and 'infinitely cruel'. The whole god idea breaks down at this level, religions can't even define what god is. This is when religions resort to wordplay by saying 'God is love. God is energy. God is in me.' and other such nonsense. Religion is the mastery of ignoring logic.
But anyway, I find it weird that religious people jump from postulating a god's existence to "therefor we worship god". Why the hell would they claim to do that and then later have the audacity to claim they have free will? Certainly as long as I have a coherent mind I'm never going to worship anything, ever. A god if an entity like that would exist would certainly have the capacity to make me worship. Besides, why would an all powerful being want to be worshipped?
For the record, I'm a confirmed athiest and devil's advocate.
A religious person would say you're repeating yourself.:)
-1, factually incorrect. People aren't being rounded up and sent to Gitmo because they disagree with American policy.
How do you know that? Without habeas corpus, that's as fair of a guess as any. Remember, you only have the government's word for the guilt of these people and that's the same government who's not terribly concerned about basic human rights.
I don't think it's completely fair to compare the incarceration rates of China and the USA without adding in all the people they execute in China.
Even those heavily opposed to chinese practices and the death penalty suggest that there might be around 6000 people executed every year in China. This is a very small number compared to the millions of people in prison.
Oh sorry officer. I forgot about the yellow curfew that is in effect. Please don't rape me.
Free speech zones? You couldn't have sounded more totalitarian even if you have tried. Free speech is a right to say offensive things at offensive places. Free speech also allows you to say nice things in the middle of the desert, but generally even a dictatorship allows you to do that.
They can't decide not to go to class
Compulsory education results in this yes.
or to sit outside class with signs and protest
Kids can certainly do that if they themselves don't have classes at the same time.
If they don't have the right to even decide if they want to go or not, they certainly don't have any inherent rights to wear offensive t-shirts, or say offensive things (such as in the middle of class when the teacher is talking).
They do have the right to wear offensive tshirts or say offensive things since free speech in this context means that the government is forbidden to prosecute the given person for saying these things. It doesn't mean there won't be any social or administrative consequences, for example due to violating the school's code of conduct as decided by the appropriate committee...
...you exhibit a serious lack of imagination. Human history is but a leaf in the wind compared to the ocean of time and space. All of the purported alien encounters are so similar to what we experience on Earth so that it's not even funny. It's like religion, overly antrophomorphic.
But it's equally detrimental if those innovations are never made. It's just as bad to NEVER INVENT something as to not sell it, or to sell it at high prices. Most people who innovate don't do it for free; they do it because they need to feed their families and might even hope to strike it big.
This is a nice pipedream, but most innovations happen because companies want to sell a product. It would happen without a patent regime too.
And the process of innovation is rarely cheap. You use the example of drugs. For every one drug that makes it to market, hundreds of drugs fail animal tests or basic safety tests, and tens more fail in human trials. These are extremely expensive.
The process of innovation isn't cheap and the pharma companies know this too. That is why they got the US government to fund their research costs almost entirely. Direct research funding from the govt. drives 90% of base drug research, plus the huge tax breaks these companies receive basically means that the government pays for just about all drug research going on in the states. Safety testing is quite cheap compared to this.
Right now we compensate drug developers for the risk and expenses of drug design by allowing them to sell the successful drugs at a price above cost. Requiring that drugs be sold at or near cost would put a halt to innovation that has saved countless lives; there'd just be no reason to sink millions (or even billions) into research and testing if any competitor could copy your product as soon as it it the shelves.
I already said, but I'll reiterate my point: the government already pays for at least 90% of this research. These companies add 10% research, patent the government research and rake in the bucks. Please just do a cursory research and you'll find the numbers. By the way, pharma spends twice as much on advertising than on research (research nominally, without substracting the tax breaks from this number).
There might be other ways to encourage innovation (government grants, government funding, competitions, etc), but any solution has to recognize that innovation is rarely cheap.
Innovation is not cheap, but why pay for it if you can get the govt. to do so? Pharma wants to have their cake and eat it too. Even at the cost of lives due to the artificially high drug prices. If you look at the tech industry, it can be clearly seen that most research is done in order to sell a product.
And anyone who believes (or disingenuously argues) that the 'property' in Intellectual Property is the information is dumber still, to the point of being what my neighbor from Texas calls a slack-jawed idjit.
Since information is the only common element between a movie made in Los Angeles and the one on my harddrive, that is a pretty safe bet.
It's really not. Protections in place protect a creator's ability to choose to reap the rewards of his invention in whatever manner he sees fit, not the manner a greedy bystander with entitlement issues and an Internet-connected computer chooses.
The key word here is "rewards". Neither in legal nor in economic theory can copyright be considered a reward. At best, it can be called compensation and as many argue, even that compensation is unjust, because there is no evidence showing that the other side, namely society, gets the progress in sciences and useful arts for which the compensation is supposed to be provided for. Noone is stopping a creator from reaping the rewards of his invention and, namely, using his invention to profit himself by selling it or endulging in moral reward by offering it to society. However, many people including me are objecting to the creator being granted an effective monopoly on information, which hinders the progress in sciences and useful arts.
I don't care that this is Slashdot. People need to grow up and face the simple reality that IP is the only thing that secures an information-based economy. It's a mechanism that needs to be tweaked and maintained, but it's absolutely essential to the first world staying the first world.
I agree with you completely, although I guess you might not agree with your own words in my interpretation. An information based economy doesn't exist, so copyright is exactly a right way to deflate an economy and move it towards the non-existent state. As to the "firest world staying the first world", let's be honest here: translated from politically correct speech that means preserving and extending the wealth imbalance.
If you create something and go through the effort of making something that has commercial value, it's yours to control, exclusively, for the duration of the patent or your life as a copyright.
Isn't this the perfect example of circular reasoning? We're arguing here about the merits of copyright (law) and you're using copyright law to back up your argument. This is self-justification at it's best. (Also, it's a distorted and mistaken way of interpreting copyright law, but let's not get into that.)
Nothing that is copyrighted is needed by anyone else to advance human society. There is no penalty and no loss by giving authors lifetime control of their creative works. If they want to share it with everyone, they're free to do so. If they want to squeeze every last penny out of it, they can do that too.
Need is an interesting word. Science and useful arts are needed in order to keep human society alive. Science is not a self serving process. Your argument is a good example of wanting to have your cake and eating it too. Either copyright is a good tool to encourage the creation of works that in turn advance the progress of science and useful arts and then it naturally follows that the works are in fact needed by everyone else to advance human society, or copyright is not a good tool to encourage works that in turn advance the progress of science and useful arts and then it follows that either works are important for advancing society, which means that they are copyrighted and controlled by copyright even though copyright wasn't an incentive to create them, or that works that are copyrighted are worthless for advancing science. The latter means that copyright is worthless.
There are huge penalties and losses by giving authors monopoly over information, as this restricts a hugely creative society from exploring new inter
To put it into more accurately worded language, I was hinting at the phonetic characteristics of tebibyte that makes the word harder to pronounce. Another poster mentioned that "quark" must have sounded weird when it was introduced the first time. I have the opposite experience. Quark is easy to pronounce, it is a distinct, hard to confuse name for a specific particle which has in fact a quite interesting etymology. I just love quark. It is actually one of the best examples of naming I could come up with, if asked off the top of my hat.
Yes, Terabyte is not entirely correct according to SI, but Tebibyte just sounds lame and language is a tool, to facilitate written and oral communication.
Of course, in this case you have to balance the confusion stemming from the Tera in IT context meaning 1024 in some cases. To be honest, people insisting on the new naming, they should have come up with a sensible sounding name and promoted that. You have to remember that language, even technical language is for the people. There are lots of ways to craft a beautiful, logical, symmetrical language that no sane person would use because it just doesn't sound convenient.
Maybe a linguist can pitch in to explain why tebibyte sounds so awful?
Exactly! After reading the few articles, wikipedia and the available information from HP, it looks more like a generational change in technology rather than just a new kind of memory. I think the Nature article's wording of discovery is correct here, this looks like an interesting piece of base research with large real world applications, instead of a specific invention to store things.
Given that this memristor looks like to be using very little power, can be scaled down very well and can be used both as storage and to build transistors - I'm pretty excited about this. Yeah, there are other attempts at non-volatile ram, but they are either slow (flash), cannot be written to many times (flash), expensive (a lot of flash alternatives) or just simply too energy consuming, the memristors should bring in some nice competition into the field, since the articles specifically state that it doesn't generate much heat at all, compared to currently existing other technologies, it can be made to change state faster than they could measure(!) in the lab and it can be repeated many times. So, the only part that is left is whether it is economically feasible to mass-produce these. I'm guessing it shouldn't be a very large problem either given the relative simplicity of this discovery.
However, what bothers me most about Monsanto, is that they are killing the concept of genetically engineered crops (which is sure to become a necessity as the Earth's population grows), by doing exactly the kind of genetic engineering that is risky, dangerous, and epitomizes the idea of taking the easy way out.
Genetic engineering can be much more dangerous than nuclear science and power plants. I see any corporate involvement in the former as a very reckless gamble. Genetical engineering can be a good thing, but only if very strict controls are applied to it. Corporations are motivated to behave in a very different way, so their involvement is not acceptable. GMO trade is something that should require far more red tape than testing a new drug does, but currently it has far less. We're not messing with a few humans like if someone messes up with a new drug, we're changing our environment with a new subspecies or species. If we make a mistake there, that is very hard to fix.
There is an interesting book, called "The World Without Us", detailing a hypotheticacl scenario of what would happen if all humans would magically disappear from Earth in the next minute. Maybe not the main topic of the book, but a large part of it deals with the effects of invading species. Asian trees on the east coast, extinction events fueled by changed conditions and species composition. It is truly frightening that most of this was caused mainly accidentally and the naturally occuring species simply being placed at another location wrecked such a huge havoc. We absolutely do not want to see the same process on steroids due to a plant artificially made more aggressive (in the way it spreads, survives, resists).
Also, population problems won't be solved by any kind of increase in food production. Even a 0.002% increase in population size very quickly turns into a physical impossibility to sustain, if continued long term. We either control the human population, or the increase is prevented by starvation and death. I'll illustrate the case by quoting Richard Dawkins:
For instance, the present population of Latin America is around 300 million, and already many of them are under-nourished. But if the population continued to increase at the present rate, it would take less than 500 years to reach the point where the people, packed in a standing position, formed a solid carpet over the whole area of the continent. This is so, even if we assume them to be very skinny - a not very unrealistic assumption. In 1,000 years from now they would be standing on each other's shoulders more than a million deep. By 2,000 years, the mountain of people, travelling outwards at the speed of light, would have reached the edge of the known universe.
Now, to answer your original question, first we have to postulate that whatever Monsanto says about the issue needs fact checking, as evidenced by Samuel Epstein's affair with Monsanto.
As far as I know the amount of IGF-1 content is significantly increased (+ 40-70%) in Posilac treated cows compared to untreated ones.
IGF-I had been associated with the growth of numerous tumors, including colon (Tricoli et al., 1986), smooth muscle (Hoppener et al., 1988), breast (Rosen et al., 1991), and others (Pavelic et al., 1986).
GF-1 is a protein hormone found in the milk of all mammals. In addition, bovine IGF-1 and human IGF-1 are identical (i.e. they have the exact same amino acid sequence).
In a fair situation Monsanto would be allowed to research things, but would be sued into oblivion if their crops would contaminate a farmer's crop and then terminate. Farmers should be able to sue Monsanto for destruction of their property, instead of the other way around.
If we allow corporations to own species or subspecies, then the incentive is in the direction of biological warfare between corporations. Artificial species are then corporately designed to spread more aggressively, treat other species with more hostility and be more resilient. This is a disaster waiting to happen.
The reason we have ethics that say it's not reasonable for anyone to own a whole species is because of the problems we encounter down the road, on the long term. If millions of dollars are needed to create a GM crop and there is no way to recoup investment other than owning a species, then that business model should FAIL. There are lots of business models that should fail, because society is not willing to pay the price of sustaining such business models. From the business' perspective, this might make sense, since they are not the ones that are directly bearing the cost of their business model, but from society's standpoint: no deal.
Slashdot Mirror
The theory doesn't match the evidence within any reasonable parameters.
[theory rejected stamp]
Does anyone have the changelog compared to beta 5?
Parent poster phrased it badly. Should have said:
"I'm a grandmother programming C, you insensitive clod!"
Isn't using Vista for those reasons a bit like being really proud of the great big bolted gate that is sure to keep intruders away, while your fence consists of grass and your house is next to the ultramodern nuclear bunker with built in natural habitat simulation that you have free access to and is frequented by hot women?
But anyway, I find it weird that religious people jump from postulating a god's existence to "therefor we worship god". Why the hell would they claim to do that and then later have the audacity to claim they have free will? Certainly as long as I have a coherent mind I'm never going to worship anything, ever. A god if an entity like that would exist would certainly have the capacity to make me worship. Besides, why would an all powerful being want to be worshipped? A religious person would say you're repeating yourself.
Only if there are an infinite number of them.
...the Flat Earth society has just announced that there might be alien life "after and slightly beneath the fringes".
Free speech zones? You couldn't have sounded more totalitarian even if you have tried. Free speech is a right to say offensive things at offensive places. Free speech also allows you to say nice things in the middle of the desert, but generally even a dictatorship allows you to do that.
Compulsory education results in this yes. Kids can certainly do that if they themselves don't have classes at the same time. They do have the right to wear offensive tshirts or say offensive things since free speech in this context means that the government is forbidden to prosecute the given person for saying these things. It doesn't mean there won't be any social or administrative consequences, for example due to violating the school's code of conduct as decided by the appropriate committee...
...you exhibit a serious lack of imagination. Human history is but a leaf in the wind compared to the ocean of time and space. All of the purported alien encounters are so similar to what we experience on Earth so that it's not even funny. It's like religion, overly antrophomorphic.
...In other words we're reaching the population peek slowly, it is expected to be around 9-10 billion by experts.
Since information is the only common element between a movie made in Los Angeles and the one on my harddrive, that is a pretty safe bet.
The key word here is "rewards". Neither in legal nor in economic theory can copyright be considered a reward. At best, it can be called compensation and as many argue, even that compensation is unjust, because there is no evidence showing that the other side, namely society, gets the progress in sciences and useful arts for which the compensation is supposed to be provided for. Noone is stopping a creator from reaping the rewards of his invention and, namely, using his invention to profit himself by selling it or endulging in moral reward by offering it to society. However, many people including me are objecting to the creator being granted an effective monopoly on information, which hinders the progress in sciences and useful arts.
I agree with you completely, although I guess you might not agree with your own words in my interpretation. An information based economy doesn't exist, so copyright is exactly a right way to deflate an economy and move it towards the non-existent state. As to the "firest world staying the first world", let's be honest here: translated from politically correct speech that means preserving and extending the wealth imbalance.
Isn't this the perfect example of circular reasoning? We're arguing here about the merits of copyright (law) and you're using copyright law to back up your argument. This is self-justification at it's best. (Also, it's a distorted and mistaken way of interpreting copyright law, but let's not get into that.)
Need is an interesting word. Science and useful arts are needed in order to keep human society alive. Science is not a self serving process. Your argument is a good example of wanting to have your cake and eating it too. Either copyright is a good tool to encourage the creation of works that in turn advance the progress of science and useful arts and then it naturally follows that the works are in fact needed by everyone else to advance human society, or copyright is not a good tool to encourage works that in turn advance the progress of science and useful arts and then it follows that either works are important for advancing society, which means that they are copyrighted and controlled by copyright even though copyright wasn't an incentive to create them, or that works that are copyrighted are worthless for advancing science. The latter means that copyright is worthless.
There are huge penalties and losses by giving authors monopoly over information, as this restricts a hugely creative society from exploring new inter
What a magnificent idea. Let's call this the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance.
To put it into more accurately worded language, I was hinting at the phonetic characteristics of tebibyte that makes the word harder to pronounce. Another poster mentioned that "quark" must have sounded weird when it was introduced the first time. I have the opposite experience. Quark is easy to pronounce, it is a distinct, hard to confuse name for a specific particle which has in fact a quite interesting etymology. I just love quark. It is actually one of the best examples of naming I could come up with, if asked off the top of my hat.
Yes, Terabyte is not entirely correct according to SI, but Tebibyte just sounds lame and language is a tool, to facilitate written and oral communication.
Of course, in this case you have to balance the confusion stemming from the Tera in IT context meaning 1024 in some cases. To be honest, people insisting on the new naming, they should have come up with a sensible sounding name and promoted that. You have to remember that language, even technical language is for the people. There are lots of ways to craft a beautiful, logical, symmetrical language that no sane person would use because it just doesn't sound convenient.
Maybe a linguist can pitch in to explain why tebibyte sounds so awful?
exit(0);
Exactly! After reading the few articles, wikipedia and the available information from HP, it looks more like a generational change in technology rather than just a new kind of memory. I think the Nature article's wording of discovery is correct here, this looks like an interesting piece of base research with large real world applications, instead of a specific invention to store things.
Given that this memristor looks like to be using very little power, can be scaled down very well and can be used both as storage and to build transistors - I'm pretty excited about this. Yeah, there are other attempts at non-volatile ram, but they are either slow (flash), cannot be written to many times (flash), expensive (a lot of flash alternatives) or just simply too energy consuming, the memristors should bring in some nice competition into the field, since the articles specifically state that it doesn't generate much heat at all, compared to currently existing other technologies, it can be made to change state faster than they could measure(!) in the lab and it can be repeated many times. So, the only part that is left is whether it is economically feasible to mass-produce these. I'm guessing it shouldn't be a very large problem either given the relative simplicity of this discovery.
The title says it all, that's what's missing from the writeup.
...and the University of Firefox.
There is an interesting book, called "The World Without Us", detailing a hypotheticacl scenario of what would happen if all humans would magically disappear from Earth in the next minute. Maybe not the main topic of the book, but a large part of it deals with the effects of invading species. Asian trees on the east coast, extinction events fueled by changed conditions and species composition. It is truly frightening that most of this was caused mainly accidentally and the naturally occuring species simply being placed at another location wrecked such a huge havoc. We absolutely do not want to see the same process on steroids due to a plant artificially made more aggressive (in the way it spreads, survives, resists).
Also, population problems won't be solved by any kind of increase in food production. Even a 0.002% increase in population size very quickly turns into a physical impossibility to sustain, if continued long term. We either control the human population, or the increase is prevented by starvation and death. I'll illustrate the case by quoting Richard Dawkins: Now, to answer your original question, first we have to postulate that whatever Monsanto says about the issue needs fact checking, as evidenced by Samuel Epstein's affair with Monsanto.
As far as I know the amount of IGF-1 content is significantly increased (+ 40-70%) in Posilac treated cows compared to untreated ones. (source)
In a fair situation Monsanto would be allowed to research things, but would be sued into oblivion if their crops would contaminate a farmer's crop and then terminate. Farmers should be able to sue Monsanto for destruction of their property, instead of the other way around.
If we allow corporations to own species or subspecies, then the incentive is in the direction of biological warfare between corporations. Artificial species are then corporately designed to spread more aggressively, treat other species with more hostility and be more resilient. This is a disaster waiting to happen.
The reason we have ethics that say it's not reasonable for anyone to own a whole species is because of the problems we encounter down the road, on the long term. If millions of dollars are needed to create a GM crop and there is no way to recoup investment other than owning a species, then that business model should FAIL. There are lots of business models that should fail, because society is not willing to pay the price of sustaining such business models. From the business' perspective, this might make sense, since they are not the ones that are directly bearing the cost of their business model, but from society's standpoint: no deal.
Voucher based education is a tax break for the wealthy. Good thing it was defeated.
I guess it is. Obviously noone would use sarcasm on slashdot, it is completely unimaginable.