Hans Howe

VERBATIM

I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. …
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it. …

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That Charlie was what this war was about. We could’ve hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.

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I’m no fan or Oracle, but their attorney makes a serious point…

Op-ed: Oracle Attorney Says Google’s Court Victory Might Kill the GPL (arstechnica.com) 278
Posted by manishs on Saturday May 28, 2016 @07:30PM from the the-other-side-of-the-coin dept.

Annette Hurst, an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial, has written an opinion piece for Ars Technica in which she urges developers and creators to not celebrate Google’s win in the hard-fought copyright case as the decision — if remains intact — is poised to make them “suffer” everywhere and also the free software movement itself “now faces substantial jeopardy.” As you’re aware, in a verdict earlier this week, a federal court announced that Google’s Android operating system didn’t infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by “fair use.” Hurst writes:

No business trying to commercialize software with any element of open software can afford to ignore this verdict. Dual licensing models are very common and have long depended upon a delicate balance between free use and commercial use. Royalties from licensed commercial exploitation fuel continued development and innovation of an open and free option. The balance depends upon adherence to the license restrictions in the open and free option.

This jury’s verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming “fair use.” It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/05/28/1730242/op-ed-oracle-attorney-says-googles-court-victory-might-kill-the-gpl

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from Slashdot 5/28/16

The Verge reports: “It was the third time in a row the company has landed a rocket booster at sea, and the fourth time overall. The landing occurred a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 delivered the THAICOM-8 satellite to space, where it will make its way to geostationary geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). GTO is a high-elliptical orbit that is popular for satellites, sitting more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. The 3,100-kilogram satellite will spend 15 years improving television and data signals across Southeast Asia.”

The company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship for the second time earlier this month. UPDATE 5/27/15: Frank249 writes in a comment: “Elon Musk just tweeted: ‘Rocket landing speed was close to design max and used up contingency crush core, hence back and forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'” He went on to tweet: “Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port).”

SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean for the third time in a row. The Verge reports: “It was the third time in a row the company has landed a rocket booster at sea, and the fourth time overall. The landing occurred a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 delivered the THAICOM-8 satellite to space, where it will make its way to geostationary geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). GTO is a high-elliptical orbit that is popular for satellites, sitting more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. The 3,100-kilogram satellite will spend 15 years improving television and data signals across Southeast Asia.”
The company landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship for the second time earlier this month. UPDATE 5/27/15: Frank249 writes in a comment: “Elon Musk just tweeted: ‘Rocket landing speed was close to design max and used up contingency crush core, hence back and forth motion. Prob ok, but some risk of tipping.'” He went on to tweet: “Crush core is aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Easy to replace (if Falcon makes it back to port).”

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11787532/spacex-falcon-9-rocket-landing-success-sea-drone-ship

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This video demonstrates multiple methods you could use to help a large Snapping Turtle across the road.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgd_B6iKPxU

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Betrayed by Congress – AGAIN

WTF? Congress can’t even get action to prevent a Zika epidemic, meanwhile every hoghouse and feedlot pumps antibiotics by the ton through animals that aren’t sick and they do nothing… and we’re about to reap the whirlwind….

By Lena H. Sun and Brady Dennis in Wash. Post 5/262016

For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could signal “the end of the road” for antibiotics.

/snip/

the discovery “heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.”
…these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country’s most urgent public health threats…

read the rest here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/05/26/the-superbug-that-doctors-have-been-dreading-just-reached-the-u-s/

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from Nature 5/25/16
Pressure from the public must force firms to develop new drugs that treat resistant infections, says Carlos Amábile-Cuevas.

http://www.nature.com/news/society-must-seize-control-of-the-antibiotics-crisis-1.19969

What are we to do about antibiotic resistance? Last week, another government report repeated stark warnings about the crisis, and offered some suggestions to improve the situation. The UK report, prepared by a panel chaired by the economist Jim O’Neill, naturally focused on financial incentives, including US$1-billion prizes for pharmaceutical firms that develop new antimicrobial drugs (see go.nature.com/a8auos).

O’Neill, who in a previous job coined the term BRIC for the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, suggested a different approach. As well as rewards for companies that invent new antibiotics, his report suggests punishments for those that do not try. Such firms, he writes, should pay a small fraction of annual sales into a fund to support rivals that invest in antibiotic research.

This is a welcome idea, but O’Neill does not go far enough. For too long, government moves to address the antibiotic-resistance crisis have focused on lucrative incentives: patent extensions, market exclusivity and higher prices. These mainly work to transfer public money into private hands, much in excess of what the research and development (R&D) actually costs. While we wait and see whether any of these interventions work, bacterial resistance continues to grow and spread, causing illness and death worldwide.

We need to take O’Neill’s idea of a punitive levy and build on it. When it comes to the pharmaceutical industry and antibiotics, we need more sticks and fewer carrots.

Antibiotics are not like other drugs. The medical effects of prescribing and taking them are not restricted to one patient. In the words of the scientist Stuart Levy — one of the first to raise the public alarm over bacterial resistance — antibiotics are “societal drugs”. This societal impact justifies an approach to the development, marketing and use of antibiotics that is different from those of other medicines and consumer goods.

Ideally, governments would wield the sticks that would encourage this different approach — for example, by delaying or denying the approval of ‘me-too’ drugs from companies that do not invest in antibiotic research. That seems unlikely, but society can step in and act instead.

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Charles Moorehead May 23, 2016 at 3:07 pm – Reply

There are two critical problems with Deep Machine Learning. The first is that there will be no way for humans to understand what the computers are doing. The second is that the head computer will come to realize that most of the problems in the world are caused by humans, so the resulting decision is to eliminate any human in a position to cause problems.
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What does this have to do with the idiots running IBM? Probably nothing much… except that they may be among the first humans eliminated by the head computer.
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Actions have consequences… always.

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