So can someone explain to me why the FBI has carte blanche to run searches through the Ancestry.com database? It says they had a court order to reveal the name, but apparently no court order was necessary to do the check, why is that?
It's still a goddamn shame that none of the allegedly "neutral" countries had the balls to take him in, but what can you do? The US is scary.
I don't think the time is yet right for him to come home, the government isn't any friendlier now than when he left and the people are only slightly less apathetic. Without some powerful public figures to support him, he doesn't stand a chance. However with the situation deteriorating in Russia I imagine it would only be a time before he was assassinated or traded back to the US, so he can't well stay there. At least this will shut up the "Why did he run if he really believes in his cause?" crowd - just kidding they'll change the script and keep on going. Always better to make it a referendum on Snowden's character than to actually talk about the real issues.
To build on this comment, one of the reasons it makes for an interesting modeling problem is that it sidesteps one of the limitations on actual pandemics - that the more deadly the disease the more difficulty it has spreading. In general (and there are exceptions) a deadly disease like Ebola has difficulty spreading because it kills its carriers(or immobilizes them) before they have a chance to infect as many people as possible. Meanwhile, 90% of humanity has some form of herpes, because it doesn't do all that much. With zombies, you have a pathogen which is fast acting and has very high fatality rates, but continues to spread through a reservoir (the zombies).
This doesn't work. The reason you get a patent in the first place is so you can market your product without fearing that it will be instantly ripped off. Let's say for example, I develop software that would say help manage data over transoceanic cables. I myself don't own any of these cables, so I would have to convince some company that did to license my software. Except that in your example they won't, since they know that if nobody licenses it then they can just replicate it themselves without fear, since I would have "no customers" and thus no claim to the patent. Perhaps if you modified your idea to where the patent has to be "in play", either a part of an offered product that is available or in development, or an internal part of a business model, and if if does not satisfy either of these for two years it is declared abandoned.
No, he shared two links to places people involved in beekeeping were talking about the system, one to the patent for the system, and then stated his own view that there might be issues with pest management and people believing that there is nothing but honey collection involved in beekeeping. Nowhere was there any whining, though perhaps some bemused skepticism.
That guessing is called using context clues, and it's an incredibly important part of reading comprehension. If you are really confused, I can see referring back to a dictionary, especially for foreign words. However it would be unusual to refer to a dictionary for every new word you encountered.
I find it fascinating how slashdotters seem to be unable to transcend their western viewpoints. There are numerous comments in here, many highly upvoted, with themes like "I wonder what their real motives are" and "This has nothing to do with terrorism, this is about controlling the population".
Guys, this is not the US, where "terrorists" are trotted out like the bogeyman for scare effects. In Pakistan, terrorists are real, active forces that have de facto control over significant amounts of the country. They are absolutely trying to get control their citizens, and in fact specifically to stop them from trying to overthrow the government, and you know what? Most Pakistanis support this because the citizens we are talking about are not part of any legitimate political process, but instead murders and gangsters who are responsible for thousands of deaths. If the US was doing the same thing for the same stated reasons, it would absolutely be a crock of shit, but this is not the US. Given the circumstances, trying to positively ID people buying phones is pretty reasonable.
No, he's right. The LD50 dose for water is somewhere around 6-10L in a sitting. With an average "dose" of maybe.5-1L, this would put it in the same range as alcohol. Of course, it is incredibly difficult to actually achieve that, since the quantity consumed is so large, which incidentally is the exact problem with comparing alcohol and heroin on this basis. Consuming a lethal dose of alcohol is generally a time consuming process, injecting a lethal dose of heroin is no more complicated than injecting a regular dose.
They are being a bit more specific than that. As in "when x increases by 1.00, y increases by 0.73".
Also, common sense thinking is a notoriously bad way to evaluate anything, as it is highly dependent on the selection and weight of initial premises. It is not at all a given that cities existing thousands of years before mass transportation, elevators, and combustion engines would work anything like modern cities.
If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defense of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.
Amusingly enough (in a dark comedy sort of way), science has shown this too. They don't even have to "want to believe", it just comes naturally.
Second this. Not only is the summary totally misleading, it bespeaks an insecurity that might well be grounded in truth. Or it's just rabble rousing, hard to tell intent with so little of the submission.
So I read through the paper, and it was certainly above my maths, but it seems the most important point was actually left out. If I understood it correctly the "extortionate" idea simply seems to be you can arbitrarily cheat, then enforce a tit-for-tat strategy until your opponent decides to give you another chance. As the modern "evolutionary" play styles seem to be built around cooperation and avoiding falling into long negative spirals, you gain an advantage. Certainly realistic, as I (as have we all) have seen these behaviors in the real world. Also not super surprising.
What I thought was interesting, and perhaps more important, was they seem to show that the player with the shortest memory controlled the game - that having a thousand turn memory didn't help against tit-for-tat, because you would end up playing tit-for-tat regardless of your larger strategy. This is an idea that I think should be explored further.
Overall it seems interesting but I imagine the applicability of the IPD to biology is somewhat limited, in that it doesn't compare the overall gains of the prisoners as a system to other prisoner's systems. i.e. a "winning" strategy very well may end up with a disproportionately large piece of a very small pie.
The group you are linking to gleefully mixes measles cases with measles deaths, (which declined earlier to cases due to better treatment of secondary infections, and better medical care all around), switches between logarithmic and linear scales on its graphs, and ends its analysis with a stirring endorsement of homeopathy. The years before the vaccine reported cases hovered around 500,000 (as the disease was considered part of growing up, many or most cases were likely not reported) by 1972 there were less than 50,000, now we could have less than 1000. This is not coincidence.
Yes, "exponential growth" has a definite, scientific meaning. Its meaning is a function whose rate of growth is proportional to its current value. Like, say a quantity which grows at a growth rate of 1.2 times its current value. We call it "exponential growth" because you can write it in the form (1*a^x), where a is a constant. In this example, it would be (1*1.2^x)
The reason you can't live in an abandoned house is that it deprives the current owners the right to use the land that it is placed on, which in the example would be the servers the game was hosted on. No one is asking that the servers be handed over. If you could copy the house onto a different plot of land, and live in it while depriving the owner of nothing, then you certainly would be allowed to.
People with healthy immune systems don't die of flu.
What about people without healthy immune systems? Is your immune system healthy, or is the way to check just to see if you die of the flu? Or maybe you get a type that kills you because you have a healthy immune system, like the 1918 pandemic, who knows.
As for the MMR vaccine causing measles, what? Before vaccinations, 90%+ of children contracted measles. Now it's down to a few hundred a year. That's a very strong correlation, but not for your theory.
13,000 documents is a lot of documents, when you are considering that they each will have to be viewed by a person. There is no way that a software solution could provide the necessary level of security while preserving enough of the documents to be useful to anyone... which brings me back to my original question: What are they looking for? If they are looking for public support then they should make it more clear why this is an issue of public concern. Right now, all I know is that the government captured a Mexican cartel leader, which doesn't seem like something I should be concerned about. For all we know about this the request is from his associates looking for people to retaliate against. (If that's the case, we may find out when they pay the fee)
I've known a number of people who had no need of a job for income, but worked anyway. I've known far more who could have found a higher paying job, but liked the one they had. Money is not the only motivator in the world.
Uber runs a risk in being so bold in trying to get rid of its workers. Until it has these cars in hand, it needs its driver fleet. Rational self-interest tells those drivers to maximize their income, but also to mitigate as much risk as possible. The most conservative when it comes to risk are frequently the most dependable employees as well, so if Uber jumps the gun they could scare off some of their best associates.
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So can someone explain to me why the FBI has carte blanche to run searches through the Ancestry.com database? It says they had a court order to reveal the name, but apparently no court order was necessary to do the check, why is that?
The person who made that accusation, Maude Delmont, had a story so obviously false that the prosecution never called her to testify at the trial.
It's still a goddamn shame that none of the allegedly "neutral" countries had the balls to take him in, but what can you do? The US is scary.
I don't think the time is yet right for him to come home, the government isn't any friendlier now than when he left and the people are only slightly less apathetic. Without some powerful public figures to support him, he doesn't stand a chance. However with the situation deteriorating in Russia I imagine it would only be a time before he was assassinated or traded back to the US, so he can't well stay there. At least this will shut up the "Why did he run if he really believes in his cause?" crowd - just kidding they'll change the script and keep on going. Always better to make it a referendum on Snowden's character than to actually talk about the real issues.
To build on this comment, one of the reasons it makes for an interesting modeling problem is that it sidesteps one of the limitations on actual pandemics - that the more deadly the disease the more difficulty it has spreading. In general (and there are exceptions) a deadly disease like Ebola has difficulty spreading because it kills its carriers(or immobilizes them) before they have a chance to infect as many people as possible. Meanwhile, 90% of humanity has some form of herpes, because it doesn't do all that much. With zombies, you have a pathogen which is fast acting and has very high fatality rates, but continues to spread through a reservoir (the zombies).
This doesn't work. The reason you get a patent in the first place is so you can market your product without fearing that it will be instantly ripped off. Let's say for example, I develop software that would say help manage data over transoceanic cables. I myself don't own any of these cables, so I would have to convince some company that did to license my software. Except that in your example they won't, since they know that if nobody licenses it then they can just replicate it themselves without fear, since I would have "no customers" and thus no claim to the patent. Perhaps if you modified your idea to where the patent has to be "in play", either a part of an offered product that is available or in development, or an internal part of a business model, and if if does not satisfy either of these for two years it is declared abandoned.
No, many of them are exactly the same, including tetracycline, ampicillin, and amoxicillin.
No, he shared two links to places people involved in beekeeping were talking about the system, one to the patent for the system, and then stated his own view that there might be issues with pest management and people believing that there is nothing but honey collection involved in beekeeping. Nowhere was there any whining, though perhaps some bemused skepticism.
I can't imagine where you are getting this information, it's just not true. Energy payback for most solar installations is less than 4 years, well within their service life. This includes inverters and mounts. Even financial payback, once not possible, now is a given.
Is...is this real? Not some wayward story from The Onion?
That guessing is called using context clues, and it's an incredibly important part of reading comprehension. If you are really confused, I can see referring back to a dictionary, especially for foreign words. However it would be unusual to refer to a dictionary for every new word you encountered.
Guys, this is not the US, where "terrorists" are trotted out like the bogeyman for scare effects. In Pakistan, terrorists are real, active forces that have de facto control over significant amounts of the country. They are absolutely trying to get control their citizens, and in fact specifically to stop them from trying to overthrow the government, and you know what? Most Pakistanis support this because the citizens we are talking about are not part of any legitimate political process, but instead murders and gangsters who are responsible for thousands of deaths. If the US was doing the same thing for the same stated reasons, it would absolutely be a crock of shit, but this is not the US. Given the circumstances, trying to positively ID people buying phones is pretty reasonable.
Really? This is what you call evil?
No, he's right. The LD50 dose for water is somewhere around 6-10L in a sitting. With an average "dose" of maybe .5-1L, this would put it in the same range as alcohol. Of course, it is incredibly difficult to actually achieve that, since the quantity consumed is so large, which incidentally is the exact problem with comparing alcohol and heroin on this basis. Consuming a lethal dose of alcohol is generally a time consuming process, injecting a lethal dose of heroin is no more complicated than injecting a regular dose.
They are being a bit more specific than that. As in "when x increases by 1.00, y increases by 0.73".
Also, common sense thinking is a notoriously bad way to evaluate anything, as it is highly dependent on the selection and weight of initial premises. It is not at all a given that cities existing thousands of years before mass transportation, elevators, and combustion engines would work anything like modern cities.
Amusingly enough (in a dark comedy sort of way), science has shown this too. They don't even have to "want to believe", it just comes naturally.
Second this. Not only is the summary totally misleading, it bespeaks an insecurity that might well be grounded in truth. Or it's just rabble rousing, hard to tell intent with so little of the submission.
So I read through the paper, and it was certainly above my maths, but it seems the most important point was actually left out. If I understood it correctly the "extortionate" idea simply seems to be you can arbitrarily cheat, then enforce a tit-for-tat strategy until your opponent decides to give you another chance. As the modern "evolutionary" play styles seem to be built around cooperation and avoiding falling into long negative spirals, you gain an advantage. Certainly realistic, as I (as have we all) have seen these behaviors in the real world. Also not super surprising.
What I thought was interesting, and perhaps more important, was they seem to show that the player with the shortest memory controlled the game - that having a thousand turn memory didn't help against tit-for-tat, because you would end up playing tit-for-tat regardless of your larger strategy. This is an idea that I think should be explored further.
Overall it seems interesting but I imagine the applicability of the IPD to biology is somewhat limited, in that it doesn't compare the overall gains of the prisoners as a system to other prisoner's systems. i.e. a "winning" strategy very well may end up with a disproportionately large piece of a very small pie.
The group you are linking to gleefully mixes measles cases with measles deaths, (which declined earlier to cases due to better treatment of secondary infections, and better medical care all around), switches between logarithmic and linear scales on its graphs, and ends its analysis with a stirring endorsement of homeopathy. The years before the vaccine reported cases hovered around 500,000 (as the disease was considered part of growing up, many or most cases were likely not reported) by 1972 there were less than 50,000, now we could have less than 1000. This is not coincidence.
Yes, "exponential growth" has a definite, scientific meaning. Its meaning is a function whose rate of growth is proportional to its current value. Like, say a quantity which grows at a growth rate of 1.2 times its current value. We call it "exponential growth" because you can write it in the form (1*a^x), where a is a constant. In this example, it would be (1*1.2^x)
Does this mean I'll be able to play City of Heroes again?
The reason you can't live in an abandoned house is that it deprives the current owners the right to use the land that it is placed on, which in the example would be the servers the game was hosted on. No one is asking that the servers be handed over. If you could copy the house onto a different plot of land, and live in it while depriving the owner of nothing, then you certainly would be allowed to.
What about people without healthy immune systems? Is your immune system healthy, or is the way to check just to see if you die of the flu? Or maybe you get a type that kills you because you have a healthy immune system, like the 1918 pandemic, who knows.
As for the MMR vaccine causing measles, what? Before vaccinations, 90%+ of children contracted measles. Now it's down to a few hundred a year. That's a very strong correlation, but not for your theory.
13,000 documents is a lot of documents, when you are considering that they each will have to be viewed by a person. There is no way that a software solution could provide the necessary level of security while preserving enough of the documents to be useful to anyone... which brings me back to my original question: What are they looking for? If they are looking for public support then they should make it more clear why this is an issue of public concern. Right now, all I know is that the government captured a Mexican cartel leader, which doesn't seem like something I should be concerned about. For all we know about this the request is from his associates looking for people to retaliate against. (If that's the case, we may find out when they pay the fee)
But why do they want these documents? It seems like an extraordinarily large ask without some similarly large rationale behind it.
I've known a number of people who had no need of a job for income, but worked anyway. I've known far more who could have found a higher paying job, but liked the one they had. Money is not the only motivator in the world.
Uber runs a risk in being so bold in trying to get rid of its workers. Until it has these cars in hand, it needs its driver fleet. Rational self-interest tells those drivers to maximize their income, but also to mitigate as much risk as possible. The most conservative when it comes to risk are frequently the most dependable employees as well, so if Uber jumps the gun they could scare off some of their best associates.