Part of the problem is that the terminator gene is not 100% effective.
A few of the seeds pollinated by such a plant will be fertile, and their children will carry the gene with them, making these half-breeds and then quater-breeds mostly infertile (but with no easy way of determining which plants have the gene and whcih don't). As the gene slowly spreads, it would cause a generalized reduction in plant fertility rates,
You will also notice that almost all major PC makers will have this line on their websites. MS gives them an extra discount for putting this exact phrase on their website and it doesn't cost them anything to do it.
They got lost. Ships hit rocks and aircraft hit mountains.
Ships would keep an active watch and log, they would triangulate their position against known landmarks, they would cross-check the ships log (odometer) with their bearing and known currents and record their estimated position on a regular basis until their could re-establish a new fix. Even when out at sea, ships would use a sextant, a clock set to GMT and the time of sunset/sunrise to give a fix to their long/lat. In fact all major commercial transport ships have to sextant on board and an captian who knows how to use it.
When sailing close to land, your exact long/lat position is less important as your relative position to things you can see. Having local knowledge of places to be careful is just as important as having a map.
GPS while very useful, and a great timesaver, but has made many sailors a bit lazy. In fact GPS has been responsible for some collisions. Some maps will include data gathered before GPS, a small island or rocky outcrop may have its absolute position slightly off. In the old days, this wouldn't be a problem, the sailor would make a note to visually sight it and sail around it. The GPS sailor may just look at a straight line on the map that skims past the island based only on GPS, which not be quite as safe in real life.
Also when sailing between two major ports, most ships will take a straight GPS line between them to sail. Thus the likelyhood of "traffic" is alot greater than a sailor who decides to sail a few miles off course and will likely not get close to any other ship.
There are two definitions of "value", the intrinsic value of its usefullness, and the scarcity/status/monetary value.
For creative works, like software, its intrinsic value to society would be greatest when everyone who had a use for it had a copy. By making software non-free this increases the cost to society, both in terms of time and money, as well as reducing the software's potential value as some people who could have benefited will choose to not to purchase. The greater the price the less society as whole benefits.
Now if the monetary cost of the software is zero, and assuming there are no other incentives to produce software, then no future software will be created and society will not receive benefit from potential software that was not created. As the profit from selling software increases, then the motivation to write software that will sell is increased and to the extent that sellable softare corresponds to useful software, society will benefit from its intrinsic usefullness but suffer the burden of its monetary cost.
However, to the extent that society finds software useful in of itself, it will provide indirect incentives for its creation. Money is simply a fungable, low hassle and standardized incentive system, which tends to be obsessively focused on in our society often to the exclusions of other motivations and purposes for our actions.
Intellectual "property" does not exist except in the minds of men, is an economic policy which "in theory" is designed to balance these two formulas at the optimal point where the overall benefit to society is greatest. In practice, and in recent decades, the focus has shifted to optimizing the second, monetary formula without regard for the intrinsic benefits to society at large. A readjustment of copyright laws, or even their abolition, would re-balance these formulas, though only time would tell if it was a more optimal alignment than our current system.
In short, our pollititions will have to decide if they want to let ideals to get in the way of a perfectly good business model.
Beyond the additional taxation (they may reduce some other taxes, but like most things it will be an overall tax increase), the scary part is that such a scheme would require a GPS tracker in each car linked to a national database. The UK already has more CCTV cameras per person than any other country in the world, and its only a matter of time before this system will start being used to track people beyond simple road taxation, first speeding tickets and parking fines, and its only a matter of time before the police start getting to use in for their investigations to see where you have been and who you have been associating with.
An army of lawyers and billions of dollars can make fighting an expensive and drawn out process, but if you have the facts on your side and are willing to stick it out (rather than choosing to settle because its cheaper that fighting), then a small group and a website can actually win.
As example, I offer up the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_caseMcLibeltr ial, which was when McDonalds sued two campaigners over a greenpeace leaflet about McDonalds for libel. McDonalds had an army of lawyers, but the couple decided to quit their jobs, study up on law and defend themselves. The case took 7 years (one of the longest in UK legal history) and they where forced to defend every claim on the leaflet. While they technically lost (though McDonalds have never tried to collect their award), McDonalds managed to turn a simple case of activist intimidation into a major PR disaster.
Some of the other issues related to using a national ID system to Internet voting, is that it will improve accuracy and validity of the election, making election fraud harder (as all the votes are fully traceable), but at the cost of the loss of the secret ballot (which a safeguard against voter intimidation / retribution for voting for unpopular parties).
Actually the premise of free software, from the point of view of freedom, is the common ownership of the means of production (if you consider software to be a tool), by having access to the source code, and the right to study, modify and distribute the code, without having to get someone else's permission, this is true decentralized and non-exclusive ownership.
The biggest difference in the information world is the lack of scarcity, there is no potential for a tragedy of the commons where too many people take and not enough people give back. Anyway, the free software movement has already shown, that is is possible to provide a positive feedback loop to encourage people to work on software without directly relating it to monetary feedback.
For communism to work, it requires a perceived lack of scarcity. For capitalism to work, it requires a perceived lack of abundance.
Same thing also happened to British Rail quite a while back. It went on for a couple of years until someone noticed the missing half penny on their payslip and actually bothered to complain to payroll about it.
One of the big differences is the fact its a secret ballot.
With an ATM, it must validate your ID (card and pin) in relationship to a pre-existing bank account and ensure you only perform commands you are allowed to, while keeping a bulletproof audit trail of everything it does.
For a voting system to work the same way, you would need a foolproof national ID system (so you can't have more than one identity or pretend to be someone else), you go to the voting machine, log your citizen ID along with your vote. Its no longer a secret ballot, but it would be fairly robust.
Its a secret ballot for a reason, so as to maintain a free and fair election (ie stop voter intimidation or reprisals), but it poses a few issues regarding the separation of user authentication from counting of the votes, while still retaining data integrity.
Its not so much the resources needed to develop the drug, but the work needed to prove to the FDA that the drug is safe (for everybody) and the legal liabilities that go without this proof, and then the resources to market this drug to all the doctors and/or public.
Had they violated copyright on a propriety piece of software, and been found out, they would most likely be subject to a lawsuit asking for a fairly large sum of money.
While releasing code goes against the instincts of control-freak lawyers, most GPL authors are not going to demand a huge cash settlement, just the release of the code. This doesn't cost money, just control.
Re:Mod me offtopic, but...
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While generally in "free" countries, letting other know how you vote is not much of an issue, its an important safeguard when a country goes down that slippery road to being a non-free country.
The basic problem, is that with a public vote, especally when dealing with non-mainstream parties, voters can be intimidated, harrassed or or otherwise stigmatised. This may make them choose to vote for (a/the) mainstreem party, or otherwise cause their vote to come with hidden costs (thus the election is no longer fair).
To give a short and semi-plausable example, suppose the police department where to lookup in the voter records for all the people who voted for the marijuana party, and decided to monitor them more closely on the assumption that most of the people who vote for that party are stoners and thus lawbreakers. An employer looking up those same records, might suddenly start asking you to take a "random" drug test, with consiquences if you refuse.
Or cast your mind back 50 years: are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party.
In communist russia, there was an optional anonymous vote. Anyone voting for the communist party would publically declare their vote, but if you where not voting for them you would be far more likely to use the secret ballot, so choosing a secret ballot would it itself make you suspect.
The current secret ballot system has taken a long time to get to its current form, but its fairly robust and comes with the safeguards to help protect a free society.
The USA and UK have recently been stripping away our civil liberties, but look back in history and ask why we demanded (and fought wars for) these civil liberties in the first place, we may be told that we don't need them in our modern world, but the question is not "why" we need them but "when" we would need them.
Making something illegal will generally stop companies from doing it (or at least until they get caught, or decide the fines are more than the profits).
However if there is still an unmet demand for something, private individuals will usually step in to meet it, often disregarding the law, especially if they see themselves as having a low risk of getting caught (its being done at home), and otherwise small enough to keep under the radar of law enforcement.
During the first gulf war, the US military was having supply issues getting enough military grade GPS receivers for all their missiles and other units (this was when the accurate signal was encrypted), though there was more than enough civilian grade GPS units.
So to bypass the problem, they decided to simply switch off the encryption for the accurate signal in Iraq, so they could use the civilian units.
The advantage given the Iraqi national guard was minimized by the fact that they where far less reliant on meter accurate GPS (ie for cruise missiles) than the US.
Part of the issue where the "free-market" can be counter-productive, is with things like utilities (such as phones, internet, roads, water, electricity).
While there is a cost to providing the service, these services provide a foundation to the productivity and ability of the rest of the economy to function.
In some cases, the best optimization for the economy as a whole may seem inefficent when only viewed in terms of a profit orientated product.
My point is not that this news is good or bad, but that all optimizations require trade-offs, and sometimes its important to look at the effects of these trade-offs on the larger picture.
I have a friend in the UK pharmaceutical industry (Glaxo), and there is a three stage process in making new drugs.
The first is trying to synthesizing the drug on a test tube scale.
When it comes to clinical trials for govenment appoval, they have to synthesize at least 3 batches in 500 gallon tanks. This shows they can produce the drug consistantly, and overcome some of the issues involved in scaling up the reaction process.
When it comes to full-scale production, they use 6000 gallon tanks.
One thing that may be non-obvious to people unfamiliar with chemistry, that there is alot of hidden knowledge in scaling up a chemical reaction to the 500 and 6000 gallon scale, the relative quantities of input chemicals and catalysts as well as the order and timing of their mix.
Chemical reactions don't all happen in a linear fashion, or on a linear timescale, so making sure that certian chemicals don't react too slow/fast or are adding at the wrong speed and thus get into the wrong ratio locally within the mix (thus generating the wrong set of reactions) and to ensure that all the chemicals have been reacted and not left in the final pill.
Its not unknown for a new chemical to be patented but then fail because they could not ramp the production process to 500 gallons, or to even get regulatory approval after successfully producing it at 500 gallons, but then fail to get mix correct at 6000 gallons.
One possible issue with generics from small pharmaceutical factories vs the big brands, is the issue of quality control in the mix process. Its the same argument when buying a cheap south-east asian knock-off for consumer electronics (though you do also stand a decent chance of getting something just as good without the brand name for half the price).
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the problem is that the terminator gene is not 100% effective.
A few of the seeds pollinated by such a plant will be fertile, and their children will carry the gene with them, making these half-breeds and then quater-breeds mostly infertile (but with no easy way of determining which plants have the gene and whcih don't). As the gene slowly spreads, it would cause a generalized reduction in plant fertility rates,
You will also notice that almost all major PC makers will have this line on their websites. MS gives them an extra discount for putting this exact phrase on their website and it doesn't cost them anything to do it.
It is possible to leave the BBC, but they will force you to disconnect from your TV.
Ships would keep an active watch and log, they would triangulate their position against known landmarks, they would cross-check the ships log (odometer) with their bearing and known currents and record their estimated position on a regular basis until their could re-establish a new fix. Even when out at sea, ships would use a sextant, a clock set to GMT and the time of sunset/sunrise to give a fix to their long/lat. In fact all major commercial transport ships have to sextant on board and an captian who knows how to use it.
When sailing close to land, your exact long/lat position is less important as your relative position to things you can see. Having local knowledge of places to be careful is just as important as having a map.
GPS while very useful, and a great timesaver, but has made many sailors a bit lazy. In fact GPS has been responsible for some collisions. Some maps will include data gathered before GPS, a small island or rocky outcrop may have its absolute position slightly off. In the old days, this wouldn't be a problem, the sailor would make a note to visually sight it and sail around it. The GPS sailor may just look at a straight line on the map that skims past the island based only on GPS, which not be quite as safe in real life.
Also when sailing between two major ports, most ships will take a straight GPS line between them to sail. Thus the likelyhood of "traffic" is alot greater than a sailor who decides to sail a few miles off course and will likely not get close to any other ship.
"What the thinker thinks, the prover proves" - Robert Anton Wilson
There are two definitions of "value", the intrinsic value of its usefullness, and the scarcity/status/monetary value.
For creative works, like software, its intrinsic value to society would be greatest when everyone who had a use for it had a copy. By making software non-free this increases the cost to society, both in terms of time and money, as well as reducing the software's potential value as some people who could have benefited will choose to not to purchase. The greater the price the less society as whole benefits.
Now if the monetary cost of the software is zero, and assuming there are no other incentives to produce software, then no future software will be created and society will not receive benefit from potential software that was not created. As the profit from selling software increases, then the motivation to write software that will sell is increased and to the extent that sellable softare corresponds to useful software, society will benefit from its intrinsic usefullness but suffer the burden of its monetary cost.
However, to the extent that society finds software useful in of itself, it will provide indirect incentives for its creation. Money is simply a fungable, low hassle and standardized incentive system, which tends to be obsessively focused on in our society often to the exclusions of other motivations and purposes for our actions.
Intellectual "property" does not exist except in the minds of men, is an economic policy which "in theory" is designed to balance these two formulas at the optimal point where the overall benefit to society is greatest. In practice, and in recent decades, the focus has shifted to optimizing the second, monetary formula without regard for the intrinsic benefits to society at large. A readjustment of copyright laws, or even their abolition, would re-balance these formulas, though only time would tell if it was a more optimal alignment than our current system.
In short, our pollititions will have to decide if they want to let ideals to get in the way of a perfectly good business model.
Beyond the additional taxation (they may reduce some other taxes, but like most things it will be an overall tax increase), the scary part is that such a scheme would require a GPS tracker in each car linked to a national database. The UK already has more CCTV cameras per person than any other country in the world, and its only a matter of time before this system will start being used to track people beyond simple road taxation, first speeding tickets and parking fines, and its only a matter of time before the police start getting to use in for their investigations to see where you have been and who you have been associating with.
I for one welcome our Big Brother overlords.
An army of lawyers and billions of dollars can make fighting an expensive and drawn out process, but if you have the facts on your side and are willing to stick it out (rather than choosing to settle because its cheaper that fighting), then a small group and a website can actually win.
r ial, which was when McDonalds sued two campaigners over a greenpeace leaflet about McDonalds for libel. McDonalds had an army of lawyers, but the couple decided to quit their jobs, study up on law and defend themselves. The case took 7 years (one of the longest in UK legal history) and they where forced to defend every claim on the leaflet. While they technically lost (though McDonalds have never tried to collect their award), McDonalds managed to turn a simple case of activist intimidation into a major PR disaster.
As example, I offer up the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_caseMcLibelt
Some of the other issues related to using a national ID system to Internet voting, is that it will improve accuracy and validity of the election, making election fraud harder (as all the votes are fully traceable), but at the cost of the loss of the secret ballot (which a safeguard against voter intimidation / retribution for voting for unpopular parties).
We have one already, its called cockney rhyming slang.
It will all go Pete Tong with the Cold Chill if you don't get off the Dog and Bone.
Actually the premise of free software, from the point of view of freedom, is the common ownership of the means of production (if you consider software to be a tool), by having access to the source code, and the right to study, modify and distribute the code, without having to get someone else's permission, this is true decentralized and non-exclusive ownership.
The biggest difference in the information world is the lack of scarcity, there is no potential for a tragedy of the commons where too many people take and not enough people give back. Anyway, the free software movement has already shown, that is is possible to provide a positive feedback loop to encourage people to work on software without directly relating it to monetary feedback.
For communism to work, it requires a perceived lack of scarcity.
For capitalism to work, it requires a perceived lack of abundance.
Same thing also happened to British Rail quite a while back. It went on for a couple of years until someone noticed the missing half penny on their payslip and actually bothered to complain to payroll about it.
Or in other words, its what happens when ideals get in the way of a perfectly good business model.
The national guard are no match for a veteran suicide bomber like myself.
One of the big differences is the fact its a secret ballot.
With an ATM, it must validate your ID (card and pin) in relationship to a pre-existing bank account and ensure you only perform commands you are allowed to, while keeping a bulletproof audit trail of everything it does.
For a voting system to work the same way, you would need a foolproof national ID system (so you can't have more than one identity or pretend to be someone else), you go to the voting machine, log your citizen ID along with your vote. Its no longer a secret ballot, but it would be fairly robust.
Its a secret ballot for a reason, so as to maintain a free and fair election (ie stop voter intimidation or reprisals), but it poses a few issues regarding the separation of user authentication from counting of the votes, while still retaining data integrity.
Its not so much the resources needed to develop the drug, but the work needed to prove to the FDA that the drug is safe (for everybody) and the legal liabilities that go without this proof, and then the resources to market this drug to all the doctors and/or public.
Had they violated copyright on a propriety piece of software, and been found out, they would most likely be subject to a lawsuit asking for a fairly large sum of money.
While releasing code goes against the instincts of control-freak lawyers, most GPL authors are not going to demand a huge cash settlement, just the release of the code. This doesn't cost money, just control.
While generally in "free" countries, letting other know how you vote is not much of an issue, its an important safeguard when a country goes down that slippery road to being a non-free country.
The basic problem, is that with a public vote, especally when dealing with non-mainstream parties, voters can be intimidated, harrassed or or otherwise stigmatised. This may make them choose to vote for (a/the) mainstreem party, or otherwise cause their vote to come with hidden costs (thus the election is no longer fair).
To give a short and semi-plausable example, suppose the police department where to lookup in the voter records for all the people who voted for the marijuana party, and decided to monitor them more closely on the assumption that most of the people who vote for that party are stoners and thus lawbreakers. An employer looking up those same records, might suddenly start asking you to take a "random" drug test, with consiquences if you refuse.
Or cast your mind back 50 years: are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party.
In communist russia, there was an optional anonymous vote. Anyone voting for the communist party would publically declare their vote, but if you where not voting for them you would be far more likely to use the secret ballot, so choosing a secret ballot would it itself make you suspect.
The current secret ballot system has taken a long time to get to its current form, but its fairly robust and comes with the safeguards to help protect a free society.
The USA and UK have recently been stripping away our civil liberties, but look back in history and ask why we demanded (and fought wars for) these civil liberties in the first place, we may be told that we don't need them in our modern world, but the question is not "why" we need them but "when" we would need them.
Making something illegal will generally stop companies from doing it (or at least until they get caught, or decide the fines are more than the profits).
However if there is still an unmet demand for something, private individuals will usually step in to meet it, often disregarding the law, especially if they see themselves as having a low risk of getting caught (its being done at home), and otherwise small enough to keep under the radar of law enforcement.
During the first gulf war, the US military was having supply issues getting enough military grade GPS receivers for all their missiles and other units (this was when the accurate signal was encrypted), though there was more than enough civilian grade GPS units.
So to bypass the problem, they decided to simply switch off the encryption for the accurate signal in Iraq, so they could use the civilian units.
The advantage given the Iraqi national guard was minimized by the fact that they where far less reliant on meter accurate GPS (ie for cruise missiles) than the US.
Its a bit like the story of the monkeys in a tree.
The ones at the top look down and all they see are the smiling faces of the other monkeys.
The ones at the bottom look up and all they see are arseholes.
Part of the issue where the "free-market" can be counter-productive, is with things like utilities (such as phones, internet, roads, water, electricity).
While there is a cost to providing the service, these services provide a foundation to the productivity and ability of the rest of the economy to function.
In some cases, the best optimization for the economy as a whole may seem inefficent when only viewed in terms of a profit orientated product.
My point is not that this news is good or bad, but that all optimizations require trade-offs, and sometimes its important to look at the effects of these trade-offs on the larger picture.
I have a friend in the UK pharmaceutical industry (Glaxo), and there is a three stage process in making new drugs.
The first is trying to synthesizing the drug on a test tube scale.
When it comes to clinical trials for govenment appoval, they have to synthesize at least 3 batches in 500 gallon tanks. This shows they can produce the drug consistantly, and overcome some of the issues involved in scaling up the reaction process.
When it comes to full-scale production, they use 6000 gallon tanks.
One thing that may be non-obvious to people unfamiliar with chemistry, that there is alot of hidden knowledge in scaling up a chemical reaction to the 500 and 6000 gallon scale, the relative quantities of input chemicals and catalysts as well as the order and timing of their mix.
Chemical reactions don't all happen in a linear fashion, or on a linear timescale, so making sure that certian chemicals don't react too slow/fast or are adding at the wrong speed and thus get into the wrong ratio locally within the mix (thus generating the wrong set of reactions) and to ensure that all the chemicals have been reacted and not left in the final pill.
Its not unknown for a new chemical to be patented but then fail because they could not ramp the production process to 500 gallons, or to even get regulatory approval after successfully producing it at 500 gallons, but then fail to get mix correct at 6000 gallons.
One possible issue with generics from small pharmaceutical factories vs the big brands, is the issue of quality control in the mix process. Its the same argument when buying a cheap south-east asian knock-off for consumer electronics (though you do also stand a decent chance of getting something just as good without the brand name for half the price).
Yes there are pills/drugs that will let you go without sleep:
There is the patentend variety: Modafinil, Adrafinil and the soon to be released Armodafinil
There is the popular in the morning variety: Caffine
There is the herbal variety: Ephedra (Ma Hung)
There is the unpatented and "might get you in trouble with the law" variety: Cocaine, Amphetamines
And then there is the non-chemical "rythym method": Polyphasic Sleep
Well technically the GIMP Animation Package can produce 3D pictures (height, width and time).