You can model any past data, but it really isn't a surprise that the model successfully predicts past outcomes, when that very data was used to generate the model. A model is useless unless it's predictive.
After only reading the summary this model will continue to be useless, because with outcomes such as "70% chance of winning" you need a large sample size (read: lots of death) to have any statistic certainty in the validity of the model.
Have you ever seen a riot (not on television)? It's scary stuff. People get trampled, beaten, and private property gets destroyed. A riot gains its power not from the handful of violent people, but rather from the hundreds (or thousands) of people surrounding the trouble makers preventing the police from arresting the agitators. If there is a riot standing around fuels the riot. If the police read the riot act (that's an expression with historical meaning - they don't have to read anything) and you fail to disperse you are part of the riot, with or without a camera.
Standing in a riot zone bolsters the mob by your presence. It's called mob mentality. If the mob hurts someone, and you're part of the mob, you are partly responsible.
To comment on your first link - If the protesters were throwing things at the police, then it can probably legitimately be called a riot. The police, by necessity, have a little more latitude during a riot it is their job to disperse the crowed to prevent damage. If there is a riot, and the police give you an order to disperse (even if you are carrying a camera) you'd better move. Failure to obey a lawful order to disperse is a crime, and you can be arrested - I don't think this violates anyones civil rights (assuming it isn't a legal and peaceful protest).
None of that is to say that filming a public official in public is in and of itself illegal. I agree that we should be watching the watchers, and that journalism, whether corporate of citizen in nature is our best guard against police abuses. However, none of that permits you to stand with your hands in your pockets in a riot zone.
I agree with the sentiment, I just feel that Washington doing what it does, will turn inward for a Bush bashing circle, and ignore more important matters. I don't think the resulting circus would improve our image abroad.
Ok, I'm with you, the president's opinion cannot be dismissed out of hand. However, the proper place to adjudicate this dispute is not in a court of law, but rather before congress during an impeachment hearing.
Personally I think that that if congress were so inclined they could nail him to the wall on this one. The president failing to obey the law is a crime.
(I think it is likely that he willfully lied about WMD in Iraq, or was at least was negligent in not assembling a competent intelligence team - but plausible deniablilty reigns here.)
I agree with the first part, and as much as I think that sending indictment to some very high places would feel oh-so-good, I tend to think that it would do some long term harm.
This is quite parallel to Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon - probably lost him the next election, and considered a horrible move at the time - but it is now (generally) considered to be a good thing. It allowed the nation to heal, and it allowed the government to move on, rather than dwelling, and dwelling on a scandal.
What we don't need post 2008 is to keep thinking about Bush. I'd rather forget about it and try to fix our tarnished image, and try to have some logical foreign policy objectives than get bogged down in a domestic quibble over the wrong-doings of the previous president..
Normally, when that happens, I just follow the link to the original posting.
This time however, that is monopolized by discussions about grammar and the editors lack thereof.
So while this story has been posted twice, there has been no meaningful discussion of an interesting topic. So - do I blame the editors for grammar/dupe problems, or the community for failing to look past some minor annoyances and actually talk about what is going on here?
No, I understand. And I know that a modern combined cycle (*not cogeneration) power plant throws away ~40% (not 2/3) of the possible energy.
Cogeneration might be more efficient in the home, but as you say (and as I didn't realize) you only run these things when you want heat and power. That would slightly more than double the time until pay-back wouldn't it?
If you want cogeneration for a residence you're more likely to succeed if you install it in a large apartment building. I don't know exactly what people are developing for these cogeneration devices, but if it is the rankine or brayton cycle turbines are expensive. Fuel cells share the cost problem, and compound it with the problems associated with hydrogen or (in TFA's case) with the problems associated with an in situ chemical plant. If it is the otto, or diesel cycle then you've got nasty incomplete combustion problems. The stirling cycle shows promise, but there are size and working fluid problems.
I still mean it when I say good luck, but I still maintain that it is very very hard to make something like this work.
The reason natural gas power plants have been falling out of favor is the extreme volatility in price of natural gas. Things might be different on that side of the pond, what with you guys being so close to the North Sea and Norway, but that volatility means you'd be paying less in the summer (when you don't need the heat) and paying a small fortune in the winter.
Couple that with the nearly inevitable fact that a home unit will be less efficient than a power plant, and I'd be willing to bet that the laws of thermo and economics guarantee that you will be paying more for natural gas than you now pay for gas and electric. Not only that but you'd be hurting the environment to boot - power plants are more able to scrub the pollutants from the combustion product than you would be able to - and the carbon emissions per kW/hr would be higher (due to the aforementioned efficiency problems).
But when I say good luck I mean it. It isn't impossible to make something like that work, just very very difficult.
Dedicating the patent to the public domain has no effect on the state of the art. The patent application is art regardless of whether the patent is granted, granted and donated to the public domain, or denied.
If the patent is broad enough to stop others from making it, but narrow enough to be granted not only will prior art will stop anyone else from patenting the same thing again, but you get paid.
If you want to be altruistic, no point in paying for a patent. Just publish the technical specifications for free (or cheep) on a website - but hey if you've solved the energy problem I'm sure Nature or Science will pick up your article - but then again getting a journal to accept your story is more work. That will stop future (similar) patents just as well as an expensive patent.
Increasing the number of Western occupying soldiers to 400,000, pushing aside the Iraqi government, and running Iraq as a colony on the basis of Western values (e.g., equality for women) will transform Iraq into a prosperous, liberal Western nation. At the end of 20 years of occupation, we can relinquish control to democratically elected Iraqi politicians who spent most of their youth in a Western-value-dominated colony.
Quick question, why do the terrorists hate us? Hint: it's not because they hates our freedoms.
The reason the region is such a mess is because we botched the colony thing the first time around. (Well not us exactly, but the British and the French.) The insurgents are actually freedom fighters in the truest sense, they want out from under the west's thumb, they want sovereignty, they want to stop being exploited. All of which could have had very positive outcomes if it weren't so damned reactionary.
You'd be pissed too if 60 years ago a friend of a friend lost a war and transplanted millions of unfriendly Muslims to - say Cancun. And then if they proceeded to expand into Southern Texas and California, setting up settlements complete with roadblocks, fences, and backed by overwhelming military might - all supplied by a distant power.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that empire building got us into this mess, and it sure as hell isn't going to fix things now. Every world leader - post-Truman has dropped the ball on the middle east, to assume that they'll roll over for us now that they have us by the gas tank is extremely arrogant and naive.
(I'm with you that Fred Thomson has an excellent chance - which would scare me, were it not for people like you and McCain.)
Ok, I know nothing about this particular drama, but less chemicals? Really, is that why Georgian wines are good? Compared to what exactly? The French, who can afford fungicides so their grapes don't rust on the vine?
Personally, I'd take the ppbs of residual chemical on the grape skin than the couple of percent of mildew infested grapes that get through in a country that doesn't use chemicals.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the DOD had just such a tactic in place.
I mean think about it, one of the things a party at war always tries to do is get the civilians of the opposite side reading "subversive" material. One of the first things we did with airplanes in war was pamphleting. We still attach pamphlets with aid drops. Would it be so strange to see the US send email to every Chinese address that looked like this? How about a flood of anti-communist text messages? Doesn't seem very far fetched to me.
How much research goes into developing harder steels for the sake of competitive advantage? From an industry perspective having a harder steel is only good if you are the only one to market it. It is also really really hard to hide what the alloy is. We've gotten pretty good at analytical chemistry, crystallography, and SEM, so a competent lab will have no problem figuring out the proportions of your alloy. Sure there is more to alloys than just the composition, but those other things can be figured out too.
Without patents metallurgy and material science would be held back which would affect a whole plethora of industries (efficient jet engines e.g.)
I haven't read the article, but I suspect what we have here is a submarine patent, which stinks an entirely different odor from obvious patents.
No, MS tells the licensees what their licensing, they just don't tell them that their "letting" Linux get away using it for free.
Imagine you're running a business and Microsoft comes up to you and says, "Hey, you know this little bit of tech that is critical to your process? Yeah we own it, here are our licensing terms." Unfortunately you don't have the legal resources to match MS and challenge the patent, and you really like staying in business so you pony up. Now imagine that MS told Linux that they were infringing on the same patent that you were licensing and MS wouldn't be suing them. Then Linux, having the following it does, and in spite of not being under immediate legal threat, releases legal arguments to the public domain that demonstrate the triviality of the MS patent. Wouldn't that make you less inclined to shell out protection money to MS?
As an aside, I know many people here hate that patents can essentially be used to extort money from others, but even in the most egalitarian patent system patents must be useful for extracting money from people who use your invention. If you want to argue that patents should be done away with all together, fine, but I'll disagree.
As far as I can tell you're not missing anything. Patents aren't like trademarks in that you have to defend them to keep them. If in some parallel universe Microsoft said, "Linux, you're infringing on the following patents:... but we're not going to sue you today," it would in no way impair their ability to sue whomever they wanted the next day. In fact it would strengthen future cases, because they could point to the notification and make arguments about willful infringement and treble damages.
What has (probably) happened here is some MS patent office guy essentially did a freedom to operate study as if he were representing Linux, he copied too many people in on the email with the findings which probably said something like, "We find that Linux could be infringing on as many as 325 Microsoft patents, however, the validity of these patents with regard to obviousness and/or prior art is debatable."
Basically another poster nailed it, when he said that the reason that microsoft isn't naming patents is so that they can license them to other "infringing" commercial entities. Had they named them, even without a suit, a slew of legal arguments contradicting Microsoft's position would be forthcoming shortly and commercial entities would have the option to use the OS legal arguments instead of feeding the beast.
Not tolerating bullying and having a zero-tolerance policy are two very different things. Not tolerating means detentions, extra work, suspensions, counseling, or parent teacher conferences. The important thing is that the administrators have options and are flexible to fine the most equitable solution.
Having a zero-tolerance policy means that the administrators have to enact some sort of draconian punishment, giving the kid no chance to reform. It also has the effect of decreasing the importance of deterrent penalties. e.g. "I know there is a zero-tolerance bullying policy, so I'm going to get kicked out of school, I might as well continue to pummel this poor kid" - or, "I've already been caught bullying, so there's no point in respecting the teacher as there are no meaningful additional penalties."
I agree with you, but why limit yourself to Muslims? Maybe every inhabitant of the middle east _is_ part of the problem, maybe every member of a Abrahamic religion _is_ part of the problem, or maybe every human being on the face of the earth _is_ part of the problem. After all, _no_ man is an island.
If the fraudster had cut the original victims in on the deal he wouldn't have been able to sell things for a loss and turned a profit. The scam works because if you sell a brand new $1200 TV for $800 and aren't liable for the original purchase you make $800 instead of losing $400.
Zero tolerance policies for minor crimes (parking, bullying, drugs, etc) are idiotic. If you really want to solve the parking problem the city should buy a couple more tow trucks and tow any illegally parked cars to a lot accessible by public transportation (less than 45 minutes away) and charge a nominal (~$20-40) fee.
Illegal parking is a problem because it is a pain in the ass for law abiding citizens and awfully convenient for the violators. My plan would make significantly less convenient to double park or neglect to feed the meter.
This plan of course presents the problem that enforcing parking would only make the public happy, and it would cease to function as a revenue generator - and we don't want our law enforcement operating like that.
I think you pretty severely underestimate the scarcity of drugs. You'd be especially hard pressed to convince me that any definition of scarce that I'm familiar with applies to crack or meth. I'm willing to agree that the cost of most other drugs (notably cocaine and heroine) would fall if they were legalized, but I'd be very surprised if the "scarcest" wouldn't be taxed to their previous price. In fact I'd expect the price of crack and meth to increase due to taxation.
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On Retro-active statistics...
You can model any past data, but it really isn't a surprise that the model successfully predicts past outcomes, when that very data was used to generate the model. A model is useless unless it's predictive.
After only reading the summary this model will continue to be useless, because with outcomes such as "70% chance of winning" you need a large sample size (read: lots of death) to have any statistic certainty in the validity of the model.
Have you ever seen a riot (not on television)? It's scary stuff. People get trampled, beaten, and private property gets destroyed. A riot gains its power not from the handful of violent people, but rather from the hundreds (or thousands) of people surrounding the trouble makers preventing the police from arresting the agitators. If there is a riot standing around fuels the riot. If the police read the riot act (that's an expression with historical meaning - they don't have to read anything) and you fail to disperse you are part of the riot, with or without a camera.
Standing in a riot zone bolsters the mob by your presence. It's called mob mentality. If the mob hurts someone, and you're part of the mob, you are partly responsible.
To comment on your first link - If the protesters were throwing things at the police, then it can probably legitimately be called a riot. The police, by necessity, have a little more latitude during a riot it is their job to disperse the crowed to prevent damage. If there is a riot, and the police give you an order to disperse (even if you are carrying a camera) you'd better move. Failure to obey a lawful order to disperse is a crime, and you can be arrested - I don't think this violates anyones civil rights (assuming it isn't a legal and peaceful protest).
None of that is to say that filming a public official in public is in and of itself illegal. I agree that we should be watching the watchers, and that journalism, whether corporate of citizen in nature is our best guard against police abuses. However, none of that permits you to stand with your hands in your pockets in a riot zone.
I agree with the sentiment, I just feel that Washington doing what it does, will turn inward for a Bush bashing circle, and ignore more important matters. I don't think the resulting circus would improve our image abroad.
Ok, I'm with you, the president's opinion cannot be dismissed out of hand. However, the proper place to adjudicate this dispute is not in a court of law, but rather before congress during an impeachment hearing.
Personally I think that that if congress were so inclined they could nail him to the wall on this one. The president failing to obey the law is a crime.
(I think it is likely that he willfully lied about WMD in Iraq, or was at least was negligent in not assembling a competent intelligence team - but plausible deniablilty reigns here.)
I agree with the first part, and as much as I think that sending indictment to some very high places would feel oh-so-good, I tend to think that it would do some long term harm.
This is quite parallel to Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon - probably lost him the next election, and considered a horrible move at the time - but it is now (generally) considered to be a good thing. It allowed the nation to heal, and it allowed the government to move on, rather than dwelling, and dwelling on a scandal.
What we don't need post 2008 is to keep thinking about Bush. I'd rather forget about it and try to fix our tarnished image, and try to have some logical foreign policy objectives than get bogged down in a domestic quibble over the wrong-doings of the previous president..
Is that why they keep trying to figure out the state of the nuclear decay triggered hydrocyanic bomb?
Or am I confused by a metaphor?
Normally, when that happens, I just follow the link to the original posting.
This time however, that is monopolized by discussions about grammar and the editors lack thereof.
So while this story has been posted twice, there has been no meaningful discussion of an interesting topic. So - do I blame the editors for grammar/dupe problems, or the community for failing to look past some minor annoyances and actually talk about what is going on here?
No, I understand. And I know that a modern combined cycle (*not cogeneration) power plant throws away ~40% (not 2/3) of the possible energy.
Cogeneration might be more efficient in the home, but as you say (and as I didn't realize) you only run these things when you want heat and power. That would slightly more than double the time until pay-back wouldn't it?
If you want cogeneration for a residence you're more likely to succeed if you install it in a large apartment building. I don't know exactly what people are developing for these cogeneration devices, but if it is the rankine or brayton cycle turbines are expensive. Fuel cells share the cost problem, and compound it with the problems associated with hydrogen or (in TFA's case) with the problems associated with an in situ chemical plant. If it is the otto, or diesel cycle then you've got nasty incomplete combustion problems. The stirling cycle shows promise, but there are size and working fluid problems.
I still mean it when I say good luck, but I still maintain that it is very very hard to make something like this work.
Good luck with that.
The reason natural gas power plants have been falling out of favor is the extreme volatility in price of natural gas. Things might be different on that side of the pond, what with you guys being so close to the North Sea and Norway, but that volatility means you'd be paying less in the summer (when you don't need the heat) and paying a small fortune in the winter.
Couple that with the nearly inevitable fact that a home unit will be less efficient than a power plant, and I'd be willing to bet that the laws of thermo and economics guarantee that you will be paying more for natural gas than you now pay for gas and electric. Not only that but you'd be hurting the environment to boot - power plants are more able to scrub the pollutants from the combustion product than you would be able to - and the carbon emissions per kW/hr would be higher (due to the aforementioned efficiency problems).
But when I say good luck I mean it. It isn't impossible to make something like that work, just very very difficult.
Dedicating the patent to the public domain has no effect on the state of the art. The patent application is art regardless of whether the patent is granted, granted and donated to the public domain, or denied.
If the patent is broad enough to stop others from making it, but narrow enough to be granted not only will prior art will stop anyone else from patenting the same thing again, but you get paid.
If you want to be altruistic, no point in paying for a patent. Just publish the technical specifications for free (or cheep) on a website - but hey if you've solved the energy problem I'm sure Nature or Science will pick up your article - but then again getting a journal to accept your story is more work. That will stop future (similar) patents just as well as an expensive patent.
Quick question, why do the terrorists hate us? Hint: it's not because they hates our freedoms.
The reason the region is such a mess is because we botched the colony thing the first time around. (Well not us exactly, but the British and the French.) The insurgents are actually freedom fighters in the truest sense, they want out from under the west's thumb, they want sovereignty, they want to stop being exploited. All of which could have had very positive outcomes if it weren't so damned reactionary.
You'd be pissed too if 60 years ago a friend of a friend lost a war and transplanted millions of unfriendly Muslims to - say Cancun. And then if they proceeded to expand into Southern Texas and California, setting up settlements complete with roadblocks, fences, and backed by overwhelming military might - all supplied by a distant power.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that empire building got us into this mess, and it sure as hell isn't going to fix things now. Every world leader - post-Truman has dropped the ball on the middle east, to assume that they'll roll over for us now that they have us by the gas tank is extremely arrogant and naive.
(I'm with you that Fred Thomson has an excellent chance - which would scare me, were it not for people like you and McCain.)
Ok, I know nothing about this particular drama, but less chemicals? Really, is that why Georgian wines are good? Compared to what exactly? The French, who can afford fungicides so their grapes don't rust on the vine?
Personally, I'd take the ppbs of residual chemical on the grape skin than the couple of percent of mildew infested grapes that get through in a country that doesn't use chemicals.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the DOD had just such a tactic in place.
I mean think about it, one of the things a party at war always tries to do is get the civilians of the opposite side reading "subversive" material. One of the first things we did with airplanes in war was pamphleting. We still attach pamphlets with aid drops. Would it be so strange to see the US send email to every Chinese address that looked like this? How about a flood of anti-communist text messages? Doesn't seem very far fetched to me.
Yes alloys are and should be patentable.
How much research goes into developing harder steels for the sake of competitive advantage? From an industry perspective having a harder steel is only good if you are the only one to market it. It is also really really hard to hide what the alloy is. We've gotten pretty good at analytical chemistry, crystallography, and SEM, so a competent lab will have no problem figuring out the proportions of your alloy. Sure there is more to alloys than just the composition, but those other things can be figured out too.
Without patents metallurgy and material science would be held back which would affect a whole plethora of industries (efficient jet engines e.g.)
I haven't read the article, but I suspect what we have here is a submarine patent, which stinks an entirely different odor from obvious patents.
No, MS tells the licensees what their licensing, they just don't tell them that their "letting" Linux get away using it for free.
Imagine you're running a business and Microsoft comes up to you and says, "Hey, you know this little bit of tech that is critical to your process? Yeah we own it, here are our licensing terms." Unfortunately you don't have the legal resources to match MS and challenge the patent, and you really like staying in business so you pony up. Now imagine that MS told Linux that they were infringing on the same patent that you were licensing and MS wouldn't be suing them. Then Linux, having the following it does, and in spite of not being under immediate legal threat, releases legal arguments to the public domain that demonstrate the triviality of the MS patent. Wouldn't that make you less inclined to shell out protection money to MS?
As an aside, I know many people here hate that patents can essentially be used to extort money from others, but even in the most egalitarian patent system patents must be useful for extracting money from people who use your invention. If you want to argue that patents should be done away with all together, fine, but I'll disagree.
As far as I can tell you're not missing anything. Patents aren't like trademarks in that you have to defend them to keep them. If in some parallel universe Microsoft said, "Linux, you're infringing on the following patents:... but we're not going to sue you today," it would in no way impair their ability to sue whomever they wanted the next day. In fact it would strengthen future cases, because they could point to the notification and make arguments about willful infringement and treble damages.
What has (probably) happened here is some MS patent office guy essentially did a freedom to operate study as if he were representing Linux, he copied too many people in on the email with the findings which probably said something like, "We find that Linux could be infringing on as many as 325 Microsoft patents, however, the validity of these patents with regard to obviousness and/or prior art is debatable."
Basically another poster nailed it, when he said that the reason that microsoft isn't naming patents is so that they can license them to other "infringing" commercial entities. Had they named them, even without a suit, a slew of legal arguments contradicting Microsoft's position would be forthcoming shortly and commercial entities would have the option to use the OS legal arguments instead of feeding the beast.
Not tolerating bullying and having a zero-tolerance policy are two very different things. Not tolerating means detentions, extra work, suspensions, counseling, or parent teacher conferences. The important thing is that the administrators have options and are flexible to fine the most equitable solution.
Having a zero-tolerance policy means that the administrators have to enact some sort of draconian punishment, giving the kid no chance to reform. It also has the effect of decreasing the importance of deterrent penalties. e.g. "I know there is a zero-tolerance bullying policy, so I'm going to get kicked out of school, I might as well continue to pummel this poor kid" - or, "I've already been caught bullying, so there's no point in respecting the teacher as there are no meaningful additional penalties."
I agree with you, but why limit yourself to Muslims? Maybe every inhabitant of the middle east _is_ part of the problem, maybe every member of a Abrahamic religion _is_ part of the problem, or maybe every human being on the face of the earth _is_ part of the problem. After all, _no_ man is an island.
If the fraudster had cut the original victims in on the deal he wouldn't have been able to sell things for a loss and turned a profit. The scam works because if you sell a brand new $1200 TV for $800 and aren't liable for the original purchase you make $800 instead of losing $400.
Zero tolerance policies for minor crimes (parking, bullying, drugs, etc) are idiotic. If you really want to solve the parking problem the city should buy a couple more tow trucks and tow any illegally parked cars to a lot accessible by public transportation (less than 45 minutes away) and charge a nominal (~$20-40) fee.
Illegal parking is a problem because it is a pain in the ass for law abiding citizens and awfully convenient for the violators. My plan would make significantly less convenient to double park or neglect to feed the meter.
This plan of course presents the problem that enforcing parking would only make the public happy, and it would cease to function as a revenue generator - and we don't want our law enforcement operating like that.
Quick question, what is your average brit inmate incarcerated for? Is it drugs like here in the US?
I think you pretty severely underestimate the scarcity of drugs. You'd be especially hard pressed to convince me that any definition of scarce that I'm familiar with applies to crack or meth. I'm willing to agree that the cost of most other drugs (notably cocaine and heroine) would fall if they were legalized, but I'd be very surprised if the "scarcest" wouldn't be taxed to their previous price. In fact I'd expect the price of crack and meth to increase due to taxation.