If you actually read the article, you'll see that they propose something just as good - requiring the full source code to be made public, which allows/. type geeks to do a complete audit.
Essentially, though, the key requirements are simple to state: secure, transparent, auditable.
Anything that fails any one of these is unacceptable.
First of all, I think that this whole article is flamebait, but aside from that...
Why just two? If you honestly think that there will be enough of a split in the social structure, why limit this to just two species?
It seems to me that we will either keep going as a single species, or there will be splits, in which case the number of splits should be regarded as N. (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming no extinction, which is the least interesting possibility for an evolutionary biologist.)
I think they are motivated by their extreme view of Islam and the values that go with it. Those who don't share that view and values (like the US) are seen as the enemy and must be eliminated.
Okay, so what can be done about it? Seriously. I think that arresting a few people here and there isn't going to help, nor will large military action.
I don't pretend to have the answer myself, but we need to have better ideas on the table than already exist.
1. The root causes you describe are IMHO correct. I could ramble on about the GINI coefficient (a measure of the distribution of income) and it's correlation to violent crime and war. Trust me, I wrote 65 pages on it.
I'd like to hear more. Any good references on the subject? For me, it just makes intuitive sense, but I haven't actually seen any research, hard numbers, etc.
As for solutions, I didn't mean to sound as if I was proposing a communist system. I think an eventual solution is an extremely difficult problem that is going to require a lot of differet approaches.
Certainly, there needs to be a better economic balance, but how do you go about creating such a thing? Give everybody $20? That's clearly absurd. I think your suggestions of helping to improve infrastructure and life quality by supporting things like parks, schools, mosques, etc. is an excellent suggestion, but it needs to be augmented by more.
Right now, I think it is important to just get people to realize that:
There is huge inequity in the world.
That is a problem.
From there, a lot of many minor policy actions made with this fact in mind can add up to a large impact. Trying to find one all-encompassing solution is a guaranteed recipe for failure.
This is a tough question, and I'm glad somebody is asking it. My thoughts haven't spent much time on your specific question, although I have often thought about the question of why is it that somebody becomes a terrorist.
The best answer I can come up with is simple desperation. If you are living a life where you see children beggin in the streets and starving to death, you tend to get pretty upset. Now, imagine that you are witnessing a world where poverty abounds, despite the fact that the land you're living on is incredibly rich of natural resources (ie, oil).
Meanwhile, the people that are using your resources have so much wealth that the problem of starvation has been replaced by the problem of obesity.
I don't know about you, but that kind of observation would make me pretty damn pissed off. If you take this anger and mix it in with a long history of conflicting social / political / religious ideologies, add a bit misguided leadership, and mix well, I'm not surprised that there are terrorists out there in the world.
You want real security in the world? Try creating global equality. Don't give up freedoms, give up the notion of cheap gas, or cheap imported goods. Live a simpler life so that people in developing nations can afford the same standard of living that you can.
Unfortunately, I don't hear anybody saying these things. Instead, I hear how we have to be strong and clamp down, "smoke them out."
What happens then? Conditions get worse for the already desperate, creating more possible terrorists, which creates more of a clampdown, which creates worse conditions, etc.
It may seem this way at first, but if you think about the problem, you'll realise that not only do they need to move the cars up and down, they also need to move them left and right, maybe even back and forth.
Suddenly, the 1-dimensional problem is turned into a 3-dimensional problem. Not only that, you'll need some kind of way to keep track of where a car is already parked and where the open spots are located. Then, to top it all off, you'll some kind of optimal path algorithm to find the shortest set of translations to get the car into the spot in a reasonable amount of time. After all, imagine if it used the exhaustive search! It could take seconds to explore the hundreds of possibilities.
Just the logic alone would take hours to write, especially if you included testing time.
Well, to reverse gender roles, I am guy who is currently wearing designer shoes.
Specifically, I am wearing the Supervog, which is Satan-resistant, a feature not available from the discount shoes.
Also, I only own one computer (an old laptop), my camera uses film, and my TV is from 1984 and doesn't have a remote. I guess you could say that I am a guy who likes shoes more than tech, although I am for some reason posting on slashdot...
For what it is worth, I think that you did the right thing.
Also, for what it is worth, I know that such situations can be extremely difficult. Last winter, I was travelling for work, and while going to the elevator in the morning, I heard some people fighting in a room down the hall. Not only were they yelling loud enough to be heard from the other end of the hall, I also heard what sounded like physical violence.
Afraid for my own safety, I got the room number, then went to the front desk, thinking that they would call the police. (If I were at home, I would have called the police.) The woman at the front desk called up to the room immediately, and the person in the room simply said that they were having "an argument."
From that, I can guess that these people were in in the midst of some kind of emotionally and (possibly) physically abusive relationship and that I was only witness to a small part of it.
Much like your encounter with the mother and daughter, I had often wondered if I did the right thing, but when encountering such dysfunction, I'm not sure what else can be done. Also, like your situation, I wonder about the people whose rooms were on the same wing of the hall or upstairs or downstairs, none of whom did anything.
Is is kind of the a Harlan Elison (sp?) short story in the anthology Deathbird Stories, where a woman is murdered in an apartment courtyard, yet nobody calls the police, despite several people seeing it. Very disturbing story, especially given how emotionally true it seems.
Also, another extremely effective anti-biotic is bleach, but that is something that you don't want to take to treat a blood infection.
The tea-tree oil is mentioned for "creams and washes," which also won't help in the case of blood infections.
I don't disagree with your thought that we should spend some more time looking into existing remedies that don't require large drug companies. Unfortunately, tea-tree oil seems to be limited as a topical treatment and is not that cure.
Some of the more recent work around S. aureus seems to indicate that although antibiotic resistance is carried through plasmids, most of the toxicity is coming through islands that are incorporated into the genome. (Sorry, I don't have a reference handy.)
Or, to put it another way (in more layman's terms), something like antibiotic resistance is a more dynamic element and is easily exhanged, whereas the core pathogenicity and toxin manufacture is a more stable, core part of what characterizes any given strain.
I think it is utterly stupid that so many people are worried about getting killed by terrorists, when over 40k people a year are killed in car crashes.
It seems to me that driving to work is far more dangerous than blocking wire-tapping efforts.
When I was recently at the eye doctor, and I told him that I spent my days staring at a screen, he told me that just staring at a screen causes people to blink less. Some tips on getting relief.
To do some wild speculation, I would guess that this is caused by the fact that we tend to look in a constant direction at all times. Part of how nature has evolved is that whenever you move your eyes from one object to another, you blink. (Google "saccade" and "blink" for more info - I can't quickly find anything concise.)
To add to the speculation, this is probably even more pronounced than when reading, since at least then you need to go the next line, turn pages, etc.
I just wanted to say that this is dead accurate. I also ride a bike, and I've noticed that if you see somebody driving poorly, wavering in and out of the lanes, having variable speed, slow reaction times, etc. there is a very good chance that said person will be talking on the phone.
Before I thought I could talk and drive, but looking around, I see how wrong this is. Now, if I'm driving, and someone calls, I'll either ignore the call or pull over.
Read this carefully. They are "developing" a technology that "would" block cell phones. This doesn't exist (yet?). I'd be suprised it they would ever succeed.
In related news, I'm developping a method to turn lead into gold. Anybody want to invest?
I must object. While you're statements are absolutely true, they are misleading. Every industrialized country has, in fact, raped its environment in order to succeed. Now, when third world nations want to rape their environments to succeed, suddenly the first world is critical, leading to the understandable anger from the 3rd world about hypocracy.
Unfortunately, though, this practice is not sustainable. Simply put, there are just too many people in the world for all of them to have the current first world status. The environment of the earth just can't sustain it.
The trouble is, third world people want a first world lifestyle, and denying them this lifestyle while millions of people have it is also not a morally correct action.
This is an impending global crisis, especially as populations continue to rise.
As I see it, the only way we as a planet can survive is through population planning with things like birth control, coupled with concerted efforts to increase the standard of living of everybody on the planet. Without controlling population, there aren't enough resources, and without equality, there is no peace.
This is part of the reason that I get so angry at US politicians who are trying to outlaw birth control (ie, condoms) in Africa. Only with controlled population (including in first world nations) can we as a species survive.
It should be noted that when we talk about a control group, we need to be explicit about what is being controlled.
In this study, their control group is designed to control the variable of age.
You are absolutely right in thinking they need to think of more details, since perhaps there is a difference between college and non-college students.
This is why in a good scientific experiment, we often talk about controls, plural, not control, singular.
My guess is that the researchers didn't look beyond college students for the simple reason that they are at a university, and it is easy to get student volunteers for a study but hard to get non-student volunteers.
As soon as I read the title, I knew I would start seeing comments dismissing this study. I think we need to look a bit more carefully at this - it may actually be true.
Is this to say that diet and exercise aren't important? Don't be silly. Of course they are still significant factors. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. A friend of mine managed to loose over 100 pounds by coming to realization that she was living an unhealthy lifestyle, then changing her lifestyle.
My point is that the viral explantion may provide additional factors contributing to obesity, especially in cases where diet and excercise levels seem otherwise reasonable.
At this point, there is too little data to tell how important this result is. In TFA they say that there was only an increase in fat, not an increase in weight, but that was in chickens, who are not people.
I say, let us just think this is an interesting result and support more research into this possibility.
As someone who is working in biotech, I can tell you that 454 Life Sciences is definitely going to be around in 2 years. Not only is this a great technology, they have already built an instrument which is being distributed by Roche (ie, one of the bigger names in biotech). At this point in the game, they can deliver more sequence information faster than anybody else.
Also, this company does not do "gene-sequencing" as the summary states, but it instead goes "genome sequencing". This is a huge difference. (For those unfamiliar with the terms - genes are the relatively small stretches of DNA that encode for a specific protein that span hundreds of nucleotides, whereas the genome is the total set of all DNA that goes into the organism and stretches for millions of nucleotides in bacteria to billions of nucleotides in humans.)
454's technology is able to sequence almost all of a bacteria in a matter of days. (I say "almost all" because of very specific technical/biological considerations more complicated than I wish to explain.) To get to a comparable point with traditional sequencing, it would take months.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually read the article, you'll see that they propose something just as good - requiring the full source code to be made public, which allows /. type geeks to do a complete audit.
Essentially, though, the key requirements are simple to state: secure, transparent, auditable.
Anything that fails any one of these is unacceptable.
First of all, I think that this whole article is flamebait, but aside from that...
Why just two? If you honestly think that there will be enough of a split in the social structure, why limit this to just two species?
It seems to me that we will either keep going as a single species, or there will be splits, in which case the number of splits should be regarded as N. (For the sake of argument, I'm assuming no extinction, which is the least interesting possibility for an evolutionary biologist.)
I think they are motivated by their extreme view of Islam and the values that go with it. Those who don't share that view and values (like the US) are seen as the enemy and must be eliminated.
Okay, so what can be done about it? Seriously. I think that arresting a few people here and there isn't going to help, nor will large military action.
I don't pretend to have the answer myself, but we need to have better ideas on the table than already exist.
1. The root causes you describe are IMHO correct. I could ramble on about the GINI coefficient (a measure of the distribution of income) and it's correlation to violent crime and war. Trust me, I wrote 65 pages on it.
I'd like to hear more. Any good references on the subject? For me, it just makes intuitive sense, but I haven't actually seen any research, hard numbers, etc.
As for solutions, I didn't mean to sound as if I was proposing a communist system. I think an eventual solution is an extremely difficult problem that is going to require a lot of differet approaches.
Certainly, there needs to be a better economic balance, but how do you go about creating such a thing? Give everybody $20? That's clearly absurd. I think your suggestions of helping to improve infrastructure and life quality by supporting things like parks, schools, mosques, etc. is an excellent suggestion, but it needs to be augmented by more.
Right now, I think it is important to just get people to realize that:
From there, a lot of many minor policy actions made with this fact in mind can add up to a large impact. Trying to find one all-encompassing solution is a guaranteed recipe for failure.
Honestly what is the goal behind terrorism?
This is a tough question, and I'm glad somebody is asking it. My thoughts haven't spent much time on your specific question, although I have often thought about the question of why is it that somebody becomes a terrorist.
The best answer I can come up with is simple desperation. If you are living a life where you see children beggin in the streets and starving to death, you tend to get pretty upset. Now, imagine that you are witnessing a world where poverty abounds, despite the fact that the land you're living on is incredibly rich of natural resources (ie, oil).
Meanwhile, the people that are using your resources have so much wealth that the problem of starvation has been replaced by the problem of obesity.
I don't know about you, but that kind of observation would make me pretty damn pissed off. If you take this anger and mix it in with a long history of conflicting social / political / religious ideologies, add a bit misguided leadership, and mix well, I'm not surprised that there are terrorists out there in the world.
You want real security in the world? Try creating global equality. Don't give up freedoms, give up the notion of cheap gas, or cheap imported goods. Live a simpler life so that people in developing nations can afford the same standard of living that you can.
Unfortunately, I don't hear anybody saying these things. Instead, I hear how we have to be strong and clamp down, "smoke them out."
What happens then? Conditions get worse for the already desperate, creating more possible terrorists, which creates more of a clampdown, which creates worse conditions, etc.
It may seem this way at first, but if you think about the problem, you'll realise that not only do they need to move the cars up and down, they also need to move them left and right, maybe even back and forth.
Suddenly, the 1-dimensional problem is turned into a 3-dimensional problem. Not only that, you'll need some kind of way to keep track of where a car is already parked and where the open spots are located. Then, to top it all off, you'll some kind of optimal path algorithm to find the shortest set of translations to get the car into the spot in a reasonable amount of time. After all, imagine if it used the exhaustive search! It could take seconds to explore the hundreds of possibilities.
Just the logic alone would take hours to write, especially if you included testing time.
I'm personally waiting for the Gibraltar Bridge. (scroll down for photos)
Well, to reverse gender roles, I am guy who is currently wearing designer shoes.
Specifically, I am wearing the Supervog, which is Satan-resistant, a feature not available from the discount shoes.
Also, I only own one computer (an old laptop), my camera uses film, and my TV is from 1984 and doesn't have a remote. I guess you could say that I am a guy who likes shoes more than tech, although I am for some reason posting on slashdot...
For what it is worth, I think that you did the right thing.
Also, for what it is worth, I know that such situations can be extremely difficult. Last winter, I was travelling for work, and while going to the elevator in the morning, I heard some people fighting in a room down the hall. Not only were they yelling loud enough to be heard from the other end of the hall, I also heard what sounded like physical violence.
Afraid for my own safety, I got the room number, then went to the front desk, thinking that they would call the police. (If I were at home, I would have called the police.) The woman at the front desk called up to the room immediately, and the person in the room simply said that they were having "an argument."
From that, I can guess that these people were in in the midst of some kind of emotionally and (possibly) physically abusive relationship and that I was only witness to a small part of it.
Much like your encounter with the mother and daughter, I had often wondered if I did the right thing, but when encountering such dysfunction, I'm not sure what else can be done. Also, like your situation, I wonder about the people whose rooms were on the same wing of the hall or upstairs or downstairs, none of whom did anything.
Is is kind of the a Harlan Elison (sp?) short story in the anthology Deathbird Stories, where a woman is murdered in an apartment courtyard, yet nobody calls the police, despite several people seeing it. Very disturbing story, especially given how emotionally true it seems.
Personally, if I were confined to a hospital bed with little hope of ever leaving, I'd spend some time screaming, too.
Somehow, the switch to watching TV just seems a little, well, brain-dead.
virulent, adj.
1. Extremely infectious, malignant, or poisonous. Used of a disease or toxin.
2. Capable of causing disease by breaking down protective mechanisms of the host. Used of a pathogen.
The tea-tree oil is mentioned for "creams and washes," which also won't help in the case of blood infections.
I don't disagree with your thought that we should spend some more time looking into existing remedies that don't require large drug companies. Unfortunately, tea-tree oil seems to be limited as a topical treatment and is not that cure.
Some of the more recent work around S. aureus seems to indicate that although antibiotic resistance is carried through plasmids, most of the toxicity is coming through islands that are incorporated into the genome. (Sorry, I don't have a reference handy.)
Or, to put it another way (in more layman's terms), something like antibiotic resistance is a more dynamic element and is easily exhanged, whereas the core pathogenicity and toxin manufacture is a more stable, core part of what characterizes any given strain.
The example of sickle cell anemia providing resistance against malaria is a beautiful example of exactly this.
Remember folks mutation = random change.
Sure, most are bad, but without change, there is no evolution.
I think it is utterly stupid that so many people are worried about getting killed by terrorists, when over 40k people a year are killed in car crashes.
It seems to me that driving to work is far more dangerous than blocking wire-tapping efforts.
"Under Republicans, man exploits man. Under Democrats, it's just the opposite."
To do some wild speculation, I would guess that this is caused by the fact that we tend to look in a constant direction at all times. Part of how nature has evolved is that whenever you move your eyes from one object to another, you blink. (Google "saccade" and "blink" for more info - I can't quickly find anything concise.)
To add to the speculation, this is probably even more pronounced than when reading, since at least then you need to go the next line, turn pages, etc.
Before I thought I could talk and drive, but looking around, I see how wrong this is. Now, if I'm driving, and someone calls, I'll either ignore the call or pull over.
In related news, I'm developping a method to turn lead into gold. Anybody want to invest?
I must object. While you're statements are absolutely true, they are misleading. Every industrialized country has, in fact, raped its environment in order to succeed. Now, when third world nations want to rape their environments to succeed, suddenly the first world is critical, leading to the understandable anger from the 3rd world about hypocracy.
Unfortunately, though, this practice is not sustainable. Simply put, there are just too many people in the world for all of them to have the current first world status. The environment of the earth just can't sustain it.
The trouble is, third world people want a first world lifestyle, and denying them this lifestyle while millions of people have it is also not a morally correct action.
This is an impending global crisis, especially as populations continue to rise.
As I see it, the only way we as a planet can survive is through population planning with things like birth control, coupled with concerted efforts to increase the standard of living of everybody on the planet. Without controlling population, there aren't enough resources, and without equality, there is no peace.
This is part of the reason that I get so angry at US politicians who are trying to outlaw birth control (ie, condoms) in Africa. Only with controlled population (including in first world nations) can we as a species survive.
In this study, their control group is designed to control the variable of age.
You are absolutely right in thinking they need to think of more details, since perhaps there is a difference between college and non-college students.
This is why in a good scientific experiment, we often talk about controls, plural, not control, singular.
My guess is that the researchers didn't look beyond college students for the simple reason that they are at a university, and it is easy to get student volunteers for a study but hard to get non-student volunteers.
Is this to say that diet and exercise aren't important? Don't be silly. Of course they are still significant factors. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. A friend of mine managed to loose over 100 pounds by coming to realization that she was living an unhealthy lifestyle, then changing her lifestyle.
My point is that the viral explantion may provide additional factors contributing to obesity, especially in cases where diet and excercise levels seem otherwise reasonable.
At this point, there is too little data to tell how important this result is. In TFA they say that there was only an increase in fat, not an increase in weight, but that was in chickens, who are not people.
I say, let us just think this is an interesting result and support more research into this possibility.
When you get a job, don't get one that sucks.
You're right. A place calling itself the "Parners for Child Passenger Safety" is going to be very biased, but biased towards keeping children safe.
Is there any reason to think that they would be biased either for or against SUVs? I can't think of any reason. If you see one, please explain.
Perhaps you own an SUV and don't like the implications?
Also, this company does not do "gene-sequencing" as the summary states, but it instead goes "genome sequencing". This is a huge difference. (For those unfamiliar with the terms - genes are the relatively small stretches of DNA that encode for a specific protein that span hundreds of nucleotides, whereas the genome is the total set of all DNA that goes into the organism and stretches for millions of nucleotides in bacteria to billions of nucleotides in humans.)
454's technology is able to sequence almost all of a bacteria in a matter of days. (I say "almost all" because of very specific technical/biological considerations more complicated than I wish to explain.) To get to a comparable point with traditional sequencing, it would take months.