While they (mostly) don't admit it, the Israelis are known to have a few hundred nuclear weapons. No doubt they have hydrogen bombs. While they don't openly test, there was what was thought to be a nuclear test in the ocean off of South Africa a while back. Even if they don't test, Israel has no shortage of smart people, or computers capable of accurate numerical modeling.
The Vela Incident on the Prince Edward Islands (the other ones) probably was a misfunction in a satellite that looked for nuclear tests, because a lot of people spent a lot of time looking for fallout or radioactivity and didn't find much. But if it was an actual test, it's more likely it was a South African device rather than one of Israel's. Israel appears to have had access to US weapon design information, so they can probably do a good job without needing tests -- and really, all they need is to appear to have nukes.
Just because there is a continuum does not mean that we cannot figure out a reasonable point to draw the ethical line. Your premises are (1) that engineers are involved in building stuff and (2) that stuff can hurt people. Your premises are valid. The logic you use to make your argument is not.
You might use the same style of argument to say that, when hitting babies, it is too hard to draw a line because some people are ok with it and some people are not and that there is a continuum of softly holding them to beating them to a pulp.
Still, you could in fact be right that engineers are without responsibility for how their products are used, but this is not clear from the logic you employed.
I don't actually think engineers are without responsibility for how their products are used. However, I do think that there are engineers who feel completely justified, and completely good, about building systems whose most obvious use is killing people. Furthermore, it's not obvious to me that I have any high moral ground for telling them that they're wrong. *I* might think they're wrong, but I'm just some dude, and it appears to me that their premises for working on such systems are logically consistent to them, and their conclusions are likewise good. As such, I don't think there is any absolute truth supporting me if I should question them.
As for your babies analogy, as someone who has spent a lot of time shoeing horses, I do not think it's right to beat horses with baseball bats, but I certainly do think it's right to smack a horse on the flank with my hand when it's leaning on me again. So yes, I do believe there are continuua of acceptable violence.
Unless your job is designing large shapeless soft foam objects, you're always going to risk someone using your creation to hurt someone else, and at each point along the continuum from plastic bag designer to nuclear weapon designer, at least a few people are going to say they're not comfortable with doing that, and at least a few people are going to say they are.
Oh please, weapons are built with the purpose of hurting, or forcing someone do something you want (under threat of hurting him). Cars and garbage bags have many other uses besides killing.
Speaking as a person who is in favor of gun control legislation, I use guns as tools for protecting my workshop from having holes punched in it by woodpeckers. (Stupid woodpeckers. I build them birdhouses, but they'd rather cut holes in the siding.) In a similar way, peace through strength, or "if we don't have a weapons system, they'll roll in and take us over", has clearly been an effective tactic for North Korea. As such, I believe it's incorrect to say that weapons are built with the purpose of hurting people. They can be built with the purpose of preventing people from getting hurt by ensuring that nobody on either side dares use them.
And, seeing as cars have killed roughly 1000 times more people than nuclear bombs in the last 100 years, I don't think it actually matters what the *purpose* of a tool is. What matters is how it is used.
More specifically, I know several people who are working on the anti-ballistic-missile missiles. The two that I've talked to about the system both are uncomfortable with its potential for destabilizing deterrence, but both are basically okay with working on the missiles themselves because they're both convinced that the system will never work.
But in the broader context, what you're talking about is a continuum of engineer responsibility: engineers who design guns have no control over whether people use them to shoot people, engineers who design cars have no control over whether people use them to run over people, and engineers who design garbage bags have no control over whether people use them to asphyxiate other people. Unless your job is designing large shapeless soft foam objects, you're always going to risk someone using your creation to hurt someone else, and at each point along the continuum from plastic bag designer to nuclear weapon designer, at least a few people are going to say they're not comfortable with doing that, and at least a few people are going to say they are. I'm not sure how one would draw a line at any given point and make a decision that beyond that point, other people were Bad People for continuing to work on those designs.
With all THAT said, I've noticed that a couple of friends who work in weapons systems drink. A lot. A lot more than most people, and a lot more than they used to when they were working on launch systems for satellites or modelling asteroid impact crater formation.
See above response to graft: there's a reason that after a billion years, the vast majority of mtDNA has migrated to the nucleus but the same few genes are retained in mitochondria across at least dozens of species of eukaryotes, from amoebas, through trees, to humans. If we are going to do genetic engineering on mitochondria, that isn't what we need to be doing to them. We need to be making mitochondria increasingly leakproof, increasingly efficient, and much more numerous. Then we should see some dramatic changes in lifespan, and I mean doubling or tripling standard human lifespan. (According to one current and reasonably well-supported theory, that is.)
Man, once our genetic engineering is good enough, one of the first things we should do is migrate those mtDNA genes into the nucleus, already, and get them working under proper sexual reproduction/selection. Clean that shit up.
Bad idea. Somewhere between 80 and 99.5% of the mitochondrial DNA has already migrated into the nucleus (comparing to bacteria that are somewhat similar to what we think mitochondria were, like Rickettsia sp.) because when an individual mitochondrion dies, it breaks apart and its DNA is floating around where it can easily be picked up.
Since there are significant differences between retained mtDNA in different animal and plant species, but there are *always* (as far as I or apparently anyone else knows) the genes for cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and NADH reductase, and apparently that's been the case for a billion years, it's pretty likely there's a good reason for it.
Currently, the assumption is that there IS a good reason for it, and that is: as a mitochondrion ages and gets damaged, it needs to change its metabolism compared to other mitochondria in the cell. There isn't any way for protein from the nucleus to be specifically built for and exported to one mitochondrion. (There are often 100,000 mitochondria in a single cell, and while there is something akin to a packet header on exported proteins, it basically says "put this in mitochondria" rather than "put this in mitochondrion #9634".) As such, mitochondria *need* to retain that DNA as a fundamental part of the metabolic regulation system.
What we need to do, once we get better genetic engineering, is to talk our mitochondria into replicating more, so we have a higher density per cell, and fiddle around with the damage feedback system. Then we'll suddenly be on the life path that birds have, where they live several times as long as mammals who have a similar size and do so with very little signs of aging.
Not only that, but since the mitochondrial DNA only codes for a small amount of the respiration chain -- cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and some of the core proteins of the NADH reductase complex, in most eukaryotic cells -- while the nuclear DNA codes for much of the rest of the proteins in the respiration chain, you need to have an excellent match between proteins that come from two different chunks of DNA. There's no guarantee that'll happen, and there's evidence that one of the reasons cloning has such a poor success rate and so many cloned animals die young of strange damage, is precisely because of poor matching between mitochondrial and nuclear dna products, leading to oxidative damage throughout the cell and early cell death because of leakage from the poorly-functioning respiration chain.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an os-based browser launcher that would look at a page and decide what browser would display it best. That way, if I click on a link going to a bunch of usenet posts it'd bring up lynx, if I wanted to watch something on youtube it'd start Opera, and if some idiot wanted to get on Farmville it'd launch a virtual machine, start Internet Explorer, and pre-emptively download a bunch of viruses.
You joke, but I have a relative (by marriage) who did this. He moved off to the wilds of North Carolina, bought a house in the woods, and raised two kids from infancy in near-total isolation. He and his wife used Biblically-based homeschooling materials that they censored. I've never met them, but my uncle's brother, who was allowed to meet them once when they were in their teens, under what he described as controlled conditions, said that he asked a question about the night sky and whether they could see satellites, and they didn't know what satellites were.
They're now in their 20's. Apparently one is a carpenter and the other is some sort of construction worker, and their father still handles most of their contact with the outside world, meeting their customers and essentially managing them.
I've done it. I also dispute the claim that she's the first person in history to have ever done it, because this was a well-known out-of-the-box solution on the CalTech campus in the late 1960's.
The smug guy says "I know you can't fold a piece of paper more than 7 times."
You say "oh yeah? any piece of paper? How about $20 says I can do it 9 times?"
Then you go get a roll of toilet paper, and you roll it out. You can find rolls of industrial-grade toilet paper: you know, the itchy horrible stuff, that are 2000 feet long, and 0.004" thick. Then you start folding in half. It takes a lot of walking, but you end up with something a couple feet long and a couple inches thick at 9 folds. If you get adding machine paper, or even better punch tape from old computers, which is both longer and thinner (some tapes) you can do better yet.
While the marketing-and-opening-screens approximation works great for "Spiderman vs. Shrek III" it doesn't seem to work anywhere nearly as well with movies like The Blair Witch Project. Those quirky breakout movies have a vastly higher profit margin so there's a very good reason to try to predict those and launch last-minute advertising campaigns.
That's not a brand-new teaching technique for motorcycle classes: when I got my license in 1988, the teachers' mantra was, and I quote, "you must ride as if every car out there wants to smoosh your guts across the road."
As a serious bicyclist, I already had that lesson memorized, having, at that point, been hit by cars that "didn't see me" (which is to say, they sped up to try to make a turn in front of me and then hit me) 3 times. It's also the reason I stopped riding motorcycles, because too many of my friends had been hit by cars that "didn't see them" and had suffered vastly worse injuries than I had on a bicycle.
>Wonder how many more US companies are going to pull out of China. First google, then godaddy, now Dell. What happens when all that China has left, is China?
My company did. We abandoned a brand-new billion dollar semiconductor fabrication facility. Officially it was because we didn't have enough work to fill it along with our several other (non-Chinese) fabs. Rumor says it was at least partly because we were tired of competing with ourselves and our fourth-shift output. However, it certainly wasn't anything to do with fear of nationalization or the unpleasantness surrounding that Australian Rio Tinto executive who was arrested and is currently being tried in China for (again, rumor has it) not bribing enough people, although I think that should be at least considered. Since the Rio Tinto trial was front-page Wall Street Journal news yesterday, I'm guessing that today a lot of people who make outsourcing decisions are thinking about it.
>The mosquito article you mention... speciifcally mentions they have NO intention iof actually making them. They just want you to pay them if you happen to want to end malaria in beach resorts, Africa, etc.
What you read says IV has no intention of going into full-scale production of the devices. They have, in fact, actually made them. Here's a video of an actual mosquito being actually zapped by an actual laser actually designed and actually built by Intellectual Ventures. It appears that they're willing to do the physical engineering to build proof-of-concept devices, then license the design to manufacturers. That is, in a nutshell, the same thing that Hewlett Packard is now doing with much of their equipment. In fact, fabless chip manufacturers, like ARM, don't actually make things, they just design them, if you want to get truly critical, so IV is less of a patent troll than the people responsible for the processors that power many cellphones. Unless you accept that some companies are good at design, and other companies are good at production, in which case building a functional proof-of-concept is clearly a case of a company actually making something.
I still think their business plan is akin to licking all the popsicles at the popsicle stand so nobody else will eat them, but at least they're building working models of some of their patents.
I'm not defending IP hoarders, and I think the general idea that Intellectual Ventures is pursuing is abhorrent, but they do indeed make things. Two weeks ago, Slashdot had a front-page article about a mosquito-killing laser system intended to be placed remotely and autonomously wipe out mosquitos, in an attempt to reduce malaria. Intellectual Ventures designed and built the functional system, which they've displayed in several places.
If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.
If you're really curious about this answer, there are some interesting books that discuss the reasons for interpersonal ambiguity (aka 'dishonesty') and how that gives people (of both sexes) both more negotiation room and better options for negotiation. A few really worthwhile books:
Promiscuity: an evolutionary history of sperm competition by Tim Birkhead, talks very little about humans but discusses (in great detail) how and why out-of-relationship and non-relationship sexual contact can benefit different reproductive strategies.
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright, which talks about how often our behavior seems to contradict our professed beliefs but how very well it matches evolutionarily successful mating strategies, and
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker, especially the second-to-last chapter which specifically addresses how ambiguity can be modelled in game theory to show huge advantages to people who use it skilfully.
In short, what people say they want isn't always what they want, but they often don't know that. They're unconsciously using successful strategies they don't actually understand, because we seem to instinctively know what works and what doesn't. In this specific case, there are many animals with mating strategies similar to humans, where females who aren't a male's primary partner benefit heavily from providing sexual access to, and receiving resources (money, food...) from, the males in question.
I'm curious about what you've said about fructose. During glycolysis, glucose-6-phosphate and fructose-6-phosphate are freely interconverted via glucose-6-phosphate isomerase, and the remainder of the glycolytic cycle takes place using the fructose isomer, converting it into the bisphosphate and proceeding to chop it up and produce NADH and ATP. glycolytic pathway. That takes place in every cell in the body that is engaging in aerobic metabolism. As such, I'm not sure how you can say that fructose is only broken down in the liver. Could you explain that?
I'm not arguing with your conclusions, and think satiety suppression is probably a major factor in why HCFS seems to result in problems, but it's not apparent to me that stress on the liver is an issue.
For the record, PETA has a $1M reward for exactly this, for exactly the reasons you're suggesting. It's interesting because a lot of PETA members are really pissed about the idea since they want people to just stop eating meat, even if it's not actually from an animal.
My old Jeep had three full stops per 10 minute period because the drum brakes were so bad. It was unpleasant to drive in town, but I got very good at shift-braking. People who have only ever driven disc brakes also don't know about not setting the parking brake after a long downhill drive, where the drum will distort because it's still so hot it's partly plastic, leaving you with even worse (and much, much more unpleasant-feeling) brakes forever afterwards or until you replace the entire drum.
Moving from drums to discs was way better than moving from carbs to fuel injection, or even from solid lifters to hydraulic lifters. Old cars suck.
They keep saying that the Cassandra database is better, but somehow I don't believe them. I can't imagine they know what they're talking about. Maybe in the long-term they'll be proven right but I really don't think they are. I don't know why, though...
I'm taking the bar tomorrow! Still, this is not legal advice, just what I remember studying about evidence law.
I'm sorry, but you don't get to say, "The course is fine," and then also get to change it immediately after a crash.
Actually, that's exactly what you get to say and do, at least when the wrongful death suit comes through. Subsequent cure is inadmissible as evidence of negligence. This is actually good public policy--you don't want a problem discovered that someone then decides to not fix because they don't want it to look like an admission...
I'm curious about this. While I agree that it's good public policy, I'm surprised to read that this is considered a legal principle because I've read claims by, for instance, aircraft companies that the reason they won't make changes to aircraft are because they're afraid that any change they make would constitute an admission that the previous design was bad and open them to lawsuits. It seems to me that if subsequent cure is inadmissable of evidence of negligence, they could get the suits dismissed, so their claims about liability aren't exactly true. Any thoughts?
Yep, and the "Olympic Movement" is given special rights under US Laws
It used to be that hosting olympic events was a money-maker for the cities involved. However recently data shows that towns that host Olympics are actually losing out. I don't agree with "special privileges" for anyone, but it's understandable to see how they can happen where there is a source of income for the state. But when the state is trying to "protect" something that is actually costing tax payer dollars, it's time to repeal laws (or repeal the damned state).
FWIW, when Colorado won the competition to host the 1976 Winter Olympics and then turned it down we did so because of the cost. It became obvious that it was an enormous money-loser for the state and almost everyone in the state except for a very few people who stood to get rich, so we voted to tell the Olympics to go somewhere else. It's not clear to me that it's *ever* been a money-maker for the cities involved, just for the few rich people who stand to get richer yet.
Of course, it's the same thing with levying sales taxes to build a football stadium, which pours money into the pockets of the team owners, and we stupidly voted for that. Maybe the Olympics was enough more money that it crossed some sort of threshhold, or maybe football's just more popular here.
Slashdot Mirror
While they (mostly) don't admit it, the Israelis are known to have a few hundred nuclear weapons. No doubt they have hydrogen bombs. While they don't openly test, there was what was thought to be a nuclear test in the ocean off of South Africa a while back. Even if they don't test, Israel has no shortage of smart people, or computers capable of accurate numerical modeling.
The Vela Incident on the Prince Edward Islands (the other ones) probably was a misfunction in a satellite that looked for nuclear tests, because a lot of people spent a lot of time looking for fallout or radioactivity and didn't find much. But if it was an actual test, it's more likely it was a South African device rather than one of Israel's. Israel appears to have had access to US weapon design information, so they can probably do a good job without needing tests -- and really, all they need is to appear to have nukes.
Just because there is a continuum does not mean that we cannot figure out a reasonable point to draw the ethical line. Your premises are (1) that engineers are involved in building stuff and (2) that stuff can hurt people. Your premises are valid. The logic you use to make your argument is not. You might use the same style of argument to say that, when hitting babies, it is too hard to draw a line because some people are ok with it and some people are not and that there is a continuum of softly holding them to beating them to a pulp. Still, you could in fact be right that engineers are without responsibility for how their products are used, but this is not clear from the logic you employed.
I don't actually think engineers are without responsibility for how their products are used. However, I do think that there are engineers who feel completely justified, and completely good, about building systems whose most obvious use is killing people. Furthermore, it's not obvious to me that I have any high moral ground for telling them that they're wrong. *I* might think they're wrong, but I'm just some dude, and it appears to me that their premises for working on such systems are logically consistent to them, and their conclusions are likewise good. As such, I don't think there is any absolute truth supporting me if I should question them.
As for your babies analogy, as someone who has spent a lot of time shoeing horses, I do not think it's right to beat horses with baseball bats, but I certainly do think it's right to smack a horse on the flank with my hand when it's leaning on me again. So yes, I do believe there are continuua of acceptable violence.
Unless your job is designing large shapeless soft foam objects, you're always going to risk someone using your creation to hurt someone else, and at each point along the continuum from plastic bag designer to nuclear weapon designer, at least a few people are going to say they're not comfortable with doing that, and at least a few people are going to say they are.
Oh please, weapons are built with the purpose of hurting, or forcing someone do something you want (under threat of hurting him). Cars and garbage bags have many other uses besides killing.
Speaking as a person who is in favor of gun control legislation, I use guns as tools for protecting my workshop from having holes punched in it by woodpeckers. (Stupid woodpeckers. I build them birdhouses, but they'd rather cut holes in the siding.) In a similar way, peace through strength, or "if we don't have a weapons system, they'll roll in and take us over", has clearly been an effective tactic for North Korea. As such, I believe it's incorrect to say that weapons are built with the purpose of hurting people. They can be built with the purpose of preventing people from getting hurt by ensuring that nobody on either side dares use them.
And, seeing as cars have killed roughly 1000 times more people than nuclear bombs in the last 100 years, I don't think it actually matters what the *purpose* of a tool is. What matters is how it is used.
But in the broader context, what you're talking about is a continuum of engineer responsibility: engineers who design guns have no control over whether people use them to shoot people, engineers who design cars have no control over whether people use them to run over people, and engineers who design garbage bags have no control over whether people use them to asphyxiate other people. Unless your job is designing large shapeless soft foam objects, you're always going to risk someone using your creation to hurt someone else, and at each point along the continuum from plastic bag designer to nuclear weapon designer, at least a few people are going to say they're not comfortable with doing that, and at least a few people are going to say they are. I'm not sure how one would draw a line at any given point and make a decision that beyond that point, other people were Bad People for continuing to work on those designs.
With all THAT said, I've noticed that a couple of friends who work in weapons systems drink. A lot. A lot more than most people, and a lot more than they used to when they were working on launch systems for satellites or modelling asteroid impact crater formation.
See above response to graft: there's a reason that after a billion years, the vast majority of mtDNA has migrated to the nucleus but the same few genes are retained in mitochondria across at least dozens of species of eukaryotes, from amoebas, through trees, to humans. If we are going to do genetic engineering on mitochondria, that isn't what we need to be doing to them. We need to be making mitochondria increasingly leakproof, increasingly efficient, and much more numerous. Then we should see some dramatic changes in lifespan, and I mean doubling or tripling standard human lifespan. (According to one current and reasonably well-supported theory, that is.)
Man, once our genetic engineering is good enough, one of the first things we should do is migrate those mtDNA genes into the nucleus, already, and get them working under proper sexual reproduction/selection. Clean that shit up.
Bad idea. Somewhere between 80 and 99.5% of the mitochondrial DNA has already migrated into the nucleus (comparing to bacteria that are somewhat similar to what we think mitochondria were, like Rickettsia sp.) because when an individual mitochondrion dies, it breaks apart and its DNA is floating around where it can easily be picked up.
Since there are significant differences between retained mtDNA in different animal and plant species, but there are *always* (as far as I or apparently anyone else knows) the genes for cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and NADH reductase, and apparently that's been the case for a billion years, it's pretty likely there's a good reason for it.
Currently, the assumption is that there IS a good reason for it, and that is: as a mitochondrion ages and gets damaged, it needs to change its metabolism compared to other mitochondria in the cell. There isn't any way for protein from the nucleus to be specifically built for and exported to one mitochondrion. (There are often 100,000 mitochondria in a single cell, and while there is something akin to a packet header on exported proteins, it basically says "put this in mitochondria" rather than "put this in mitochondrion #9634".) As such, mitochondria *need* to retain that DNA as a fundamental part of the metabolic regulation system.
What we need to do, once we get better genetic engineering, is to talk our mitochondria into replicating more, so we have a higher density per cell, and fiddle around with the damage feedback system. Then we'll suddenly be on the life path that birds have, where they live several times as long as mammals who have a similar size and do so with very little signs of aging.
Not only that, but since the mitochondrial DNA only codes for a small amount of the respiration chain -- cytochrome C oxidase, ATP synthase, and some of the core proteins of the NADH reductase complex, in most eukaryotic cells -- while the nuclear DNA codes for much of the rest of the proteins in the respiration chain, you need to have an excellent match between proteins that come from two different chunks of DNA. There's no guarantee that'll happen, and there's evidence that one of the reasons cloning has such a poor success rate and so many cloned animals die young of strange damage, is precisely because of poor matching between mitochondrial and nuclear dna products, leading to oxidative damage throughout the cell and early cell death because of leakage from the poorly-functioning respiration chain.
Could someone post an actual stong password you have in use?
1-3-7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2-6_3H-7H_dione
But it's not my password for slashdot.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an os-based browser launcher that would look at a page and decide what browser would display it best. That way, if I click on a link going to a bunch of usenet posts it'd bring up lynx, if I wanted to watch something on youtube it'd start Opera, and if some idiot wanted to get on Farmville it'd launch a virtual machine, start Internet Explorer, and pre-emptively download a bunch of viruses.
There are scads of youtube videos of multi-axis machining, from impellers to V8 engine blocks, that are several years old. But, way before youtube, in the 1970's, Japanese nine-axis milling machines helped Soviet designers make submarine propellers vastly quieter, meaning subs like the Soviet Typhoon-class were roughly as quiet as American subs had been for a while. The military and export implications of multi-axis milling machine technology was mentioned in US Congress debates at the time: In 1983-1984 the Japanese firm Toshiba sold sophisticated, nine axis milling equipment to the Soviets along with the computer control systems, which were developed by Norwegian firm Kongsberg Vaapenfabrik. U.S Navy officials and Congressmen announced that this technology enabled the Soviet submarine builders to produce more accurate and quieter propellers. So this is by no means new, but it sure is pretty.
They're now in their 20's. Apparently one is a carpenter and the other is some sort of construction worker, and their father still handles most of their contact with the outside world, meeting their customers and essentially managing them.
The smug guy says "I know you can't fold a piece of paper more than 7 times."
You say "oh yeah? any piece of paper? How about $20 says I can do it 9 times?"
Then you go get a roll of toilet paper, and you roll it out. You can find rolls of industrial-grade toilet paper: you know, the itchy horrible stuff, that are 2000 feet long, and 0.004" thick. Then you start folding in half. It takes a lot of walking, but you end up with something a couple feet long and a couple inches thick at 9 folds. If you get adding machine paper, or even better punch tape from old computers, which is both longer and thinner (some tapes) you can do better yet.
While the marketing-and-opening-screens approximation works great for "Spiderman vs. Shrek III" it doesn't seem to work anywhere nearly as well with movies like The Blair Witch Project. Those quirky breakout movies have a vastly higher profit margin so there's a very good reason to try to predict those and launch last-minute advertising campaigns.
As a serious bicyclist, I already had that lesson memorized, having, at that point, been hit by cars that "didn't see me" (which is to say, they sped up to try to make a turn in front of me and then hit me) 3 times. It's also the reason I stopped riding motorcycles, because too many of my friends had been hit by cars that "didn't see them" and had suffered vastly worse injuries than I had on a bicycle.
My company did. We abandoned a brand-new billion dollar semiconductor fabrication facility. Officially it was because we didn't have enough work to fill it along with our several other (non-Chinese) fabs. Rumor says it was at least partly because we were tired of competing with ourselves and our fourth-shift output. However, it certainly wasn't anything to do with fear of nationalization or the unpleasantness surrounding that Australian Rio Tinto executive who was arrested and is currently being tried in China for (again, rumor has it) not bribing enough people, although I think that should be at least considered. Since the Rio Tinto trial was front-page Wall Street Journal news yesterday, I'm guessing that today a lot of people who make outsourcing decisions are thinking about it.
What you read says IV has no intention of going into full-scale production of the devices. They have, in fact, actually made them. Here's a video of an actual mosquito being actually zapped by an actual laser actually designed and actually built by Intellectual Ventures. It appears that they're willing to do the physical engineering to build proof-of-concept devices, then license the design to manufacturers. That is, in a nutshell, the same thing that Hewlett Packard is now doing with much of their equipment. In fact, fabless chip manufacturers, like ARM, don't actually make things, they just design them, if you want to get truly critical, so IV is less of a patent troll than the people responsible for the processors that power many cellphones. Unless you accept that some companies are good at design, and other companies are good at production, in which case building a functional proof-of-concept is clearly a case of a company actually making something.
I still think their business plan is akin to licking all the popsicles at the popsicle stand so nobody else will eat them, but at least they're building working models of some of their patents.
If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.
If you're really curious about this answer, there are some interesting books that discuss the reasons for interpersonal ambiguity (aka 'dishonesty') and how that gives people (of both sexes) both more negotiation room and better options for negotiation. A few really worthwhile books:
Promiscuity: an evolutionary history of sperm competition by Tim Birkhead, talks very little about humans but discusses (in great detail) how and why out-of-relationship and non-relationship sexual contact can benefit different reproductive strategies.
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright, which talks about how often our behavior seems to contradict our professed beliefs but how very well it matches evolutionarily successful mating strategies, and
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker, especially the second-to-last chapter which specifically addresses how ambiguity can be modelled in game theory to show huge advantages to people who use it skilfully.
In short, what people say they want isn't always what they want, but they often don't know that. They're unconsciously using successful strategies they don't actually understand, because we seem to instinctively know what works and what doesn't. In this specific case, there are many animals with mating strategies similar to humans, where females who aren't a male's primary partner benefit heavily from providing sexual access to, and receiving resources (money, food...) from, the males in question.
I'm not arguing with your conclusions, and think satiety suppression is probably a major factor in why HCFS seems to result in problems, but it's not apparent to me that stress on the liver is an issue.
For the record, PETA has a $1M reward for exactly this, for exactly the reasons you're suggesting. It's interesting because a lot of PETA members are really pissed about the idea since they want people to just stop eating meat, even if it's not actually from an animal.
blast, replied to the wrong comment. Sorry.
Moving from drums to discs was way better than moving from carbs to fuel injection, or even from solid lifters to hydraulic lifters. Old cars suck.
heh heh heh.
I'm taking the bar tomorrow! Still, this is not legal advice, just what I remember studying about evidence law.
Actually, that's exactly what you get to say and do, at least when the wrongful death suit comes through. Subsequent cure is inadmissible as evidence of negligence. This is actually good public policy--you don't want a problem discovered that someone then decides to not fix because they don't want it to look like an admission...
I'm curious about this. While I agree that it's good public policy, I'm surprised to read that this is considered a legal principle because I've read claims by, for instance, aircraft companies that the reason they won't make changes to aircraft are because they're afraid that any change they make would constitute an admission that the previous design was bad and open them to lawsuits. It seems to me that if subsequent cure is inadmissable of evidence of negligence, they could get the suits dismissed, so their claims about liability aren't exactly true. Any thoughts?
Yep, and the "Olympic Movement" is given special rights under US Laws
It used to be that hosting olympic events was a money-maker for the cities involved. However recently data shows that towns that host Olympics are actually losing out. I don't agree with "special privileges" for anyone, but it's understandable to see how they can happen where there is a source of income for the state. But when the state is trying to "protect" something that is actually costing tax payer dollars, it's time to repeal laws (or repeal the damned state).
FWIW, when Colorado won the competition to host the 1976 Winter Olympics and then turned it down we did so because of the cost. It became obvious that it was an enormous money-loser for the state and almost everyone in the state except for a very few people who stood to get rich, so we voted to tell the Olympics to go somewhere else. It's not clear to me that it's *ever* been a money-maker for the cities involved, just for the few rich people who stand to get richer yet.
Of course, it's the same thing with levying sales taxes to build a football stadium, which pours money into the pockets of the team owners, and we stupidly voted for that. Maybe the Olympics was enough more money that it crossed some sort of threshhold, or maybe football's just more popular here.