There are so many species of microbes that live within us as symbiots. Some consider the entire body of us as something like an ant or bee colony. The germline cells that end up in the gonads alone go on to produce offspring. All the remaining cells (like blood cells, muscle cells, etc) choose to remain sterile to help the germline cells reproduce.
For some of the bee colonies, the workers and the queen have genetic relatedness of 0.75, our body cells have r=1 between blood cells and gonads. Thus the insect colony is a looser agglomeration and our bodies are tighter agglomerations. Between parent and children the relatedness factor r=0.5, between cousins r= 0.125. uncles/aunts to nephews/nieces r= 0.25. In societies where first cousin marriage is encouraged, the general relatedness of the population could be much higher. Though it was not unknown in Europe (Einestein, Darwin married their first cousins) it is more common in the East. Even then most of them allow only children of a brother and sister to marry, not children of two brothers or children of two sisters. The only exception is the Ottoman empire which made marriage between children of brothers legal/halal/kosher. (Since Ottoman empire was Islamic many people confuse this practice with Islam. But in Muslim countries that were never ruled by the Ottomans this practice is very rare). Places that were once ruled by the Ottoman empire you could have whole villages or clans where all males have exactly the same y chromosome and have very high degree of relatedness. Such populations would pledge allegiance to the clan and take great personal sacrifices for the sake of their clans or tribes or villages or their shieks.
You could see the level of personal sacrifice made by individual animals or cells as a continuum plotted on genetic relatedness factor r. Our cells pledge very tight allegiance to the germline cells, ants/bees somewhat looser, human societies with very high relatedness have high patriotic feelings and personal sacrifices for the sake of community.
Trying to impose a western style democracy of a society with a mean value r on to other societies with an order of magnitude different r would not work easily. Giving autonomy and self governance for people/tribes/clans with high degree of relatedness, but subject to collective punishments and rewards would be considered sacrilege in the West. But such practices are more likely to succeed, pacify the population and lead to peace.
It is Barracuda. I discovered the dastardly translators had renamed Barracuda as CID Lawrence and Frollo as Judo David. Basically the ships were stolen to provide slave labor to a crazy (is there any other kind?) villain hiding inside a cave of the dormant volcano.
Cabin pressure loss would trigger warnings and drop oxygen masks. I don't know about carbon monoxide detectors. Carbon monoxide is odorless, people don't feel it, pilots might realize they are losing it and try to do strange things. One pilot taking a bathroom break, a small fire, not warm enough to trigger alarms but slow enough to release CO. Disoriented pilot doing strange things or cabin crew flipping switches after seeing collapsed pilots... I tend to think of those as likely scenarios. Not a Dirk Pitt adventure.
Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it. Greenland colonization attempt, anasazi Indians etc. When the collapse avoidance is still possible, the new course requires sacrifices from the current top dogs of the system. Not being sure whether the top-dogginess will persist in the new course, they stay on original course to disaster.
First I need to get the pilot(s) to cooperate. Then I would file a fake flight plan from Manila to Bangaladesh or Kabul or some place to take place at about the same time. Then smuggle a transponder in a brief case into the plane. It is basically a radio that is all. Switch off the transponder of the main aircraft. Climb/dive to confuse the radar tracks. Manually fly the plane to a different way point. Turn on the fake transponder. Identify the plane with a new call sign and contact Port Blair Andaman Islands air traffic control, continue to execute the fake flight plan.
After I land, I don't know what I would do with 239 - X number of people in Kabul or Bangladesh.
Credit for the inspiration: When I was in sixth grade I read a comic where they steal ships. A submarine releases a fog of anesthetic in the path of the ship. One person on board uses oxygen cylinder to escape. When everyone has fainted this guy, radios out claiming to be a different ship (Campbell Cross, I still remember the fake name) coming in for assistance. Meanwhile the pirates board the plane, secure the crew below the decks, repaint the ships name. Radio out saying there are np debris, no ship to be seen. Participate in the grid search and then slink away. The tamil name for the title is "kaatril karaintha kappalkaL" , or ships dissolving into thin air. It was translated from some British comic book. I don't know the name of the original in English. The heros who solve the mystery are Lawrence and Judo David. Can any one help find the original?
If one pilot decides to something funny, and the other pilot figures it out and a tussle breaks out, and if one of them survives, but with serious injury... As I said there are no easy theories...
Some pilots have defected with their planes. If you do not count it as "theft" of aircraft
it is very difficult to steal an aircraft. In my memory only this guy managed to do it. But he had the advantage of becoming invisible if electricity passes through him and he had a remote controlled steel hand too.
There are very few clues. Some tantalizing pings, between 4 to 6 on the satellites, some delay in transponder being turned off etc are the bare facts on which these elaborate theories are being spun. But I keep thinking about the Helios flight disaster. The maintenance crew had left the cabin pressurization in "manual" mode. The pilot did not notice. The plane warned about cabin pressure. But the pilot was confused and continued to climb to cruise altitude. Deprived of oxygen, all of them died when the oxygen ran out. Pilots never put on the mask and died soon. Plane without pilots, may be with a few passengers alive for half an hour longer, flew on auto pilot for several hours. One crew member, a flight attendant, a former navy diver was seen in the cockpit lugging a (probably empty oxygen) cylinder by the chase planes. Eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in the mountain.
It is possible somehow both pilots lost control of the plane and it flew on auto pilot, following whatever route was programmed into it.
woooosh! Just look up, you might see the contrail if the joke that flew far above you. On the other hand, you could claim to be a linux user who has never seen that "remind me later" dialog nagging at the bottom of the screen.
Let us see if Rand Paul denounces the Tesla dealership roadblocks thrown up by these states. Publicly. Suo moto. To a right wing crowd. Bet he would weasel out saying he would not trample on "States' rights". Alan Greyson does not yet have presidential or statewide office ambitions, it looks like. When he does, you would expect more "nuanced" position on the issues.
They reel you in with that el-cheapo 100K offer, but then you have to sign a 24 month contract. The "unlimited" streaming plan streams at high speed only for 2GB, then it crawls at 128 Kbps. Want really really unlimited, then you pay per GB. Then there are roaming charges. International roaming charges. Then international texting charges. You have to root the device to install WhatsApp. When the contract is up they will do employ high pressure sales tactics to sign on for another two years for marginal upgrades. Original "free" equipment is designed to crap out in 24 months. Stay away from these data streaming companies.
Common mistake. You have been used to the "truth in labeling law" "truth in advertising law" etc for so long, you have assumed it applies to everyone. Sorry my dear friend, the politicians are exempted from those laws. They can label themselves "free market loving libertarian right wingers" or "mother earth worshiping tree hugging beer-can-recycling post-cosumer-waste-reconsuming environment loving left wingers". But there is absolutely no guarantee the politician you find under those labels are truly what the label says.
Terrorists are dumb. That is the only thing saving humanity. Even people with half of an working brain can come up with ideas for tremendous destruction. But people smart enough to think them up are smart enough not to be conned into being a terrorist.
I am self censoring myself from giving you some trivial examples of how great harm can be done without undue risk to oneself, not because I am afraid terrorists will read slashdot and carry out these diabolical deeds. But because NSA might be reading it.:-)
Yes, they have brain three times the size of human. But they need to control some 100 times more muscle fibers (7000 Kg vs 70 Kg). They might not have that many neurons left over for mental activity.
Though they understand and communicate in human, their ability seems to be confined to the dialect male. They don't understand female. They still use terms like legitimate rape. They use the term "host" instead of "mother" showing their poor grasp of female. Mostly they seem to turn a deaf ear to female.
Wait. You are not talking about those elephants, are you?
Bitcoins are not like real money. When the bank says I have 200$ in my account, all previous transactions I had and how I came to own 200$ in my account are totally opaque. The bank can figure out the transactions to some extent when it involves other accounts in the same bank. That is all. If the money is in the form of dollar bills in my physical wallet nobody knows how I came to own that 200$.
In the Bitcoin universe, if I say I have 2.0345 bit coins, I am actually saying, "I mined 0.2 bit coins, then I got 0.223 bits from this ID, I gave 1.033 to... got xxx from yyy... and so on and so on so I finally have 2.0345 coins". All these transactions have been verified and digitally signed by multiple people around the world. Every time you declare your balance, you are actually disclosing the entire chain of transactions that created your final balance. So if I got some coins from MtGox hackers, forever there is a record of me getting some coins from those hackers.
There is absolutely no anonymity within bit coin universe. Every transaction is tied to the public key of the user id and it can be tracked.
We may not be able to tie those identities with the real world identities. We may not be able to stop those hackers from spending their loot. I am not sure there is infrastructure to mark some public keys as "persona non grata" and remove their privileges or maintains lists of thieves.
What was the government wrong doing that the government is paying reparations for? I don't fully follow the logic here. US Govt did lots of bad things. Basically we stole so much of water from Mexico in Colorado. We have broken the treaties. Then we met the letter of the law, not the spirit, by giving them water in specified quantity but laced with fertilizer so much it is unusable for them. Not just US govt. Los Angeles secretly bought water rights from Owen's valley(?) and pumped the water over hundreds of miles. New York has bought water rights from Hudson upstate secretly in the 1930s. Water politics was brutal.
But when the Government bears so much of the cost of providing irrigation, the farmers can not claim their profits are all made in free market. All in all, it might benefit America for the government to socialize the cost of irrigation and privatize the profits. I have nothing against that in principle. But there should be a recognition that Government creates value. Govt is like a venture capitalist that invests in broad infrastructure, broadly in the next generation. And whoever exploits the infrastructure well, whoever succeeds due to govt investments in the internet, universities and public schools, pay a part of the profits as dividend to the government. Taxation is not theft, it is dividend. When we allow rabble rousers to roundly condemn the government, use hyperbole like "all taxation is theft", "government steals", "government always hurts and never helps" etc with impunity, we are not being fair.
My understanding of the "mining" process is this: Mining is nothing but repeatedly verifying a block, using different randomly generated salt, till the checksum matches a predefined criterion, like so many leading zeros or something. The bitcoins awarded to the the "miners" are basically fees paid to them to verify the transaction block. Bitcoin system has to create an incentive for large number of people with lots of computing power to do the drudgery work of verifying the transactions. They call it mining. But the coins "mined" by this process is very small and it mints a fresh coin and does not affect the coins already in circulation.
When a bitcoin user is already in possession of the coin the user can spend it freely. That transaction gets mingled with lots of other transactions in the block. I don't think it is feasible to "punish" one transaction in the block without hampering the others. Further it requires Bitcoin system to maintain a list of "thieves". How feasible that would be, I don't know.
Yes, every bit of bitcoin that ever went through MtGox can be traced. Both downstream from MtGox and also upstream about where they came from. But the trouble is, all those trails start and end with the public keys of the users. You need some sort of government level power to track them from Bitcoin universe to real world.
Most farmers who grow alfalfa are those who got water at throw away prices back in 1920s/1930s when the Hoover dam was being built, when they pumped the Colorado river over the Sierra Neveda to irrigate the water starved central valley. Then through political action, through law suits and by claiming these as their "right" they have been taking water and much below market prices and wasting it all in stupid crops like alfalfa. If they paid market rates, we could just shrug and leave it to free markets. But after taking in all that water pumped by the government, at far below cost, at far below market rates, they turn around and claim to be "freedom lovers", "get the government out of my hair", "government never creates value" "taxation is theft" libertarians.
I have been a long time customer of T-mobile, mainly because my brother and sister-in-law were in it and back then in-network and out-of-network mattered. But many of my friends switched to AT&T because their kids wanted iPhones.
One of them told me yesterday, "I think I should send T-mobile a donation. AT&T has cut my price in half because of T-mobile". He was paying 300$ for five lines. AT&T reduced it to 160$ for unlimited talk and text and 10GB of high speed data, combined data quota, and hot spot ability, free international roaming at 128 kbps, free international texts.
It is to be expected, there are no new killer must-have features on the new phones, and so the customers don't feel the need to run on the upgrade treadmill. So they days of giving a "free" phone at some 200% margin in installments to the customers are gone. US cell phone market is trending towards sanity now.
What is special about La Brea tar pits is that they get multiple specimens of the same species, males, females, juveniles, old and young. They get complete skeletons instead of a few disjoint pieces. They are chronically short of funds. They have dug up huge blocks which are presently sitting covered in tarps because they don't have the resources to properly pry the fossils off these blocks. Earlier they used to discard the "matrix" and go after the big bones. Now they realize the matrix has tons and tons of microfossils, pollen grains etc. That realization has slowed down the speed at which they work on these blocks.
The least the producers of the Big Bang Theory could have done is to pay some decent fees to the museum and written an episode to place inside the museum. Those cheapskates just had one scene outside in the bus stop and a stuffed toy from the museum.
Slashdot Mirror
For some of the bee colonies, the workers and the queen have genetic relatedness of 0.75, our body cells have r=1 between blood cells and gonads. Thus the insect colony is a looser agglomeration and our bodies are tighter agglomerations. Between parent and children the relatedness factor r=0.5, between cousins r= 0.125. uncles/aunts to nephews/nieces r= 0.25. In societies where first cousin marriage is encouraged, the general relatedness of the population could be much higher. Though it was not unknown in Europe (Einestein, Darwin married their first cousins) it is more common in the East. Even then most of them allow only children of a brother and sister to marry, not children of two brothers or children of two sisters. The only exception is the Ottoman empire which made marriage between children of brothers legal/halal/kosher. (Since Ottoman empire was Islamic many people confuse this practice with Islam. But in Muslim countries that were never ruled by the Ottomans this practice is very rare). Places that were once ruled by the Ottoman empire you could have whole villages or clans where all males have exactly the same y chromosome and have very high degree of relatedness. Such populations would pledge allegiance to the clan and take great personal sacrifices for the sake of their clans or tribes or villages or their shieks.
You could see the level of personal sacrifice made by individual animals or cells as a continuum plotted on genetic relatedness factor r. Our cells pledge very tight allegiance to the germline cells, ants/bees somewhat looser, human societies with very high relatedness have high patriotic feelings and personal sacrifices for the sake of community.
Trying to impose a western style democracy of a society with a mean value r on to other societies with an order of magnitude different r would not work easily. Giving autonomy and self governance for people/tribes/clans with high degree of relatedness, but subject to collective punishments and rewards would be considered sacrilege in the West. But such practices are more likely to succeed, pacify the population and lead to peace.
It is Barracuda. I discovered the dastardly translators had renamed Barracuda as CID Lawrence and Frollo as Judo David. Basically the ships were stolen to provide slave labor to a crazy (is there any other kind?) villain hiding inside a cave of the dormant volcano.
Cabin pressure loss would trigger warnings and drop oxygen masks. I don't know about carbon monoxide detectors. Carbon monoxide is odorless, people don't feel it, pilots might realize they are losing it and try to do strange things. One pilot taking a bathroom break, a small fire, not warm enough to trigger alarms but slow enough to release CO. Disoriented pilot doing strange things or cabin crew flipping switches after seeing collapsed pilots... I tend to think of those as likely scenarios. Not a Dirk Pitt adventure.
Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it. Greenland colonization attempt, anasazi Indians etc. When the collapse avoidance is still possible, the new course requires sacrifices from the current top dogs of the system. Not being sure whether the top-dogginess will persist in the new course, they stay on original course to disaster.
None of them could even turn on the radio if it was off.
After I land, I don't know what I would do with 239 - X number of people in Kabul or Bangladesh.
Credit for the inspiration: When I was in sixth grade I read a comic where they steal ships. A submarine releases a fog of anesthetic in the path of the ship. One person on board uses oxygen cylinder to escape. When everyone has fainted this guy, radios out claiming to be a different ship (Campbell Cross, I still remember the fake name) coming in for assistance. Meanwhile the pirates board the plane, secure the crew below the decks, repaint the ships name. Radio out saying there are np debris, no ship to be seen. Participate in the grid search and then slink away. The tamil name for the title is "kaatril karaintha kappalkaL" , or ships dissolving into thin air. It was translated from some British comic book. I don't know the name of the original in English. The heros who solve the mystery are Lawrence and Judo David. Can any one help find the original?
If one pilot decides to something funny, and the other pilot figures it out and a tussle breaks out, and if one of them survives, but with serious injury... As I said there are no easy theories ...
Some pilots have defected with their planes. If you do not count it as "theft" of aircraft it is very difficult to steal an aircraft. In my memory only this guy managed to do it. But he had the advantage of becoming invisible if electricity passes through him and he had a remote controlled steel hand too.
It is possible somehow both pilots lost control of the plane and it flew on auto pilot, following whatever route was programmed into it.
woooosh! Just look up, you might see the contrail if the joke that flew far above you. On the other hand, you could claim to be a linux user who has never seen that "remind me later" dialog nagging at the bottom of the screen.
Let us see if Rand Paul denounces the Tesla dealership roadblocks thrown up by these states. Publicly. Suo moto. To a right wing crowd. Bet he would weasel out saying he would not trample on "States' rights". Alan Greyson does not yet have presidential or statewide office ambitions, it looks like. When he does, you would expect more "nuanced" position on the issues.
They reel you in with that el-cheapo 100K offer, but then you have to sign a 24 month contract. The "unlimited" streaming plan streams at high speed only for 2GB, then it crawls at 128 Kbps. Want really really unlimited, then you pay per GB. Then there are roaming charges. International roaming charges. Then international texting charges. You have to root the device to install WhatsApp. When the contract is up they will do employ high pressure sales tactics to sign on for another two years for marginal upgrades. Original "free" equipment is designed to crap out in 24 months. Stay away from these data streaming companies.
Common mistake. You have been used to the "truth in labeling law" "truth in advertising law" etc for so long, you have assumed it applies to everyone. Sorry my dear friend, the politicians are exempted from those laws. They can label themselves "free market loving libertarian right wingers" or "mother earth worshiping tree hugging beer-can-recycling post-cosumer-waste-reconsuming environment loving left wingers". But there is absolutely no guarantee the politician you find under those labels are truly what the label says.
I am self censoring myself from giving you some trivial examples of how great harm can be done without undue risk to oneself, not because I am afraid terrorists will read slashdot and carry out these diabolical deeds. But because NSA might be reading it. :-)
Yes, they have brain three times the size of human. But they need to control some 100 times more muscle fibers (7000 Kg vs 70 Kg). They might not have that many neurons left over for mental activity.
Wait. You are not talking about those elephants, are you?
In the Bitcoin universe, if I say I have 2.0345 bit coins, I am actually saying, "I mined 0.2 bit coins, then I got 0.223 bits from this ID, I gave 1.033 to ... got xxx from yyy ... and so on and so on so I finally have 2.0345 coins". All these transactions have been verified and digitally signed by multiple people around the world. Every time you declare your balance, you are actually disclosing the entire chain of transactions that created your final balance. So if I got some coins from MtGox hackers, forever there is a record of me getting some coins from those hackers.
There is absolutely no anonymity within bit coin universe. Every transaction is tied to the public key of the user id and it can be tracked.
We may not be able to tie those identities with the real world identities. We may not be able to stop those hackers from spending their loot. I am not sure there is infrastructure to mark some public keys as "persona non grata" and remove their privileges or maintains lists of thieves.
But when the Government bears so much of the cost of providing irrigation, the farmers can not claim their profits are all made in free market. All in all, it might benefit America for the government to socialize the cost of irrigation and privatize the profits. I have nothing against that in principle. But there should be a recognition that Government creates value. Govt is like a venture capitalist that invests in broad infrastructure, broadly in the next generation. And whoever exploits the infrastructure well, whoever succeeds due to govt investments in the internet, universities and public schools, pay a part of the profits as dividend to the government. Taxation is not theft, it is dividend. When we allow rabble rousers to roundly condemn the government, use hyperbole like "all taxation is theft", "government steals", "government always hurts and never helps" etc with impunity, we are not being fair.
When a bitcoin user is already in possession of the coin the user can spend it freely. That transaction gets mingled with lots of other transactions in the block. I don't think it is feasible to "punish" one transaction in the block without hampering the others. Further it requires Bitcoin system to maintain a list of "thieves". How feasible that would be, I don't know.
Yes, every bit of bitcoin that ever went through MtGox can be traced. Both downstream from MtGox and also upstream about where they came from. But the trouble is, all those trails start and end with the public keys of the users. You need some sort of government level power to track them from Bitcoin universe to real world.
Hackers or the peddler of juvenile trading cards? Who you gonna believe?
Most farmers who grow alfalfa are those who got water at throw away prices back in 1920s/1930s when the Hoover dam was being built, when they pumped the Colorado river over the Sierra Neveda to irrigate the water starved central valley. Then through political action, through law suits and by claiming these as their "right" they have been taking water and much below market prices and wasting it all in stupid crops like alfalfa. If they paid market rates, we could just shrug and leave it to free markets. But after taking in all that water pumped by the government, at far below cost, at far below market rates, they turn around and claim to be "freedom lovers", "get the government out of my hair", "government never creates value" "taxation is theft" libertarians.
One of them told me yesterday, "I think I should send T-mobile a donation. AT&T has cut my price in half because of T-mobile". He was paying 300$ for five lines. AT&T reduced it to 160$ for unlimited talk and text and 10GB of high speed data, combined data quota, and hot spot ability, free international roaming at 128 kbps, free international texts.
It is to be expected, there are no new killer must-have features on the new phones, and so the customers don't feel the need to run on the upgrade treadmill. So they days of giving a "free" phone at some 200% margin in installments to the customers are gone. US cell phone market is trending towards sanity now.
The least the producers of the Big Bang Theory could have done is to pay some decent fees to the museum and written an episode to place inside the museum. Those cheapskates just had one scene outside in the bus stop and a stuffed toy from the museum.
sorry for a couple of typos. as easily as china in one case. prey not pray in another case.