The statistics used to say that GMO foods will not create a problem. They are heavily flawed and in serous need of a bit of applied chaos math with genetic outcome variations. The 'safe margin' used in the generation of mutation included no viral strains present in the habitats where the foods are raised. Scientists have definitely not finished mapping the proteins responsible for cell behavior when a cell is presented with infection. This means that we HAVE NO IDEA what viruses may or may not arise from infection of a GMO used for farming. Absolutely NO IDEA. Never modeled or studied.

Genomics isn't a simple statistic of probability of mutation. Millions of organisms interact with each other in every ecology, and only weak statistical probabilities based on weak environmental observations are enough for the 'intellectual elite' to declare us safe?

That's not science, that's gambling in an establishment known for cheating.

Paramount is attempting to write law using the threat of big-money legal harassment as their police force. Many corporations do this.

The issue here is that Paramount isn't a lawyer, and their grip on a cultural meme doesn't expire. It's a money game where cultural evolution is dictated by intellectual property rights that are unsupportable for society itself.

It has been over 50 years since star trek became a part of our culture. It has been propagating through two generations of humanity. The right to communicate with shared cultural meme cannot be 'owned' as intellectual property in perpetuity, or like the airwaves soon every shared idea will be owned by someone. There must be limits.

Yet another article that takes massive liberties with pure speculation and has almost nothing to do with science other than the word scientist.

High-Tech rednecks are a lot less expensive to hire than Hipsters and Yuppies.

Heck I can get a website cobbled together for a case of beer and one visit to a strip club.

In 20 years I have yet to find a television show that comes anywhere close to 'what people would really do'

This AI is going to think everyone is either a clown, or a ninja. That one can always spot a villain by his monologing and that the only true evil is getting things for free.

But I thought that the shader pipelines were basically low-latency vector processing chains.

The cost of these supercomputers is astronomical, so why the petaflops?
As I understand it the benefit of a supercomputer is BUS speed (getting data between the CPU caches quickly) for massively parallel computing tasks. What I don't understand is why there are so few hybrids using parallel GPU processing (2x512x8/16/32GB) to achieve the same tasks, even for weather applications. It seems to me that processing blocks could be exchanged over fiber sufficiently for real time applications, but I may not fully understand the problem?

As I understand it the supercomputers have separate dedicated channels for types of memory exchanges for large matrices that get updated by all the processors, but block updates aren't read anywhere near as quickly as the chunks being worked on. It seems that the delay wouldn't make much difference overall, but I don't claim to be an expert on it.

CNN article: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/1...

For what it's worth, this has been down-played in media (haven't seen it blasting twitter and stuff much)

So basically NONE OF THE PROPOSALS would have prevented him from getting a gun.

As a voter, I'm sick of intelligent and informed voters being sidelined by media and legal cowboy politicians.

Not to outright criminalize them, but certainly to make it a civil offense to hire people to lie for you. There are plenty of misinformed idiots already, paying people to make them into mobs should be discouraged.

Unlike authors, corporations live forever. They don't give a flying crap in the accounting department how many old fans get pissed off, because fans die. Revenue streams are forever. All they have to do is sit on a trademark (brand name) or copyright (of which Star Trek is both) until things die down. They'll give placebos to the fans a little, but honestly Axanar isn't well-known enough yet to hurt them over the long haul.

They'll just outlive any displeasure.

My biggest argument against all of this is that Axanar is a completely new story in a fictional universe that they bought the IP rights to. It's a social idea hook. It's LONG past the original 35 year copyright span.

The point of that original span was to be the lifetime of the exclusive ownership of a body of work for a reasonable time as defined by the following criteria:
1.) The lifetime of an author to enjoy the rights to his labor without theft.
2.) A reasonable compromise between cultural saturation and ownership. Over that amount of time it is unreasonable for any owner to expect any popular work to remain under their sole control due to the nature of human society.

Star Trek is now a cultural meme. It is a consistent fictional universe with a life of it's own. Attempting to extend ownership of an idea in perpetuity is a lucrative corporate wet dream, but it flies in the face of the way human society works. We evolve based on our shared dreams, desires and cultural ideas. Parents have now introduced TWO GENERATIONS to Star Trek without marketing based on an old ideal created by a now-dead author. Most graduates from high school have watched NONE, NOT ONE of the series of STTOS, STTNG, DS9, Voyager and even Enterprise has only been watched by a few. Ask them.

IP isn't just about the works anymore, it's about language and meme... owning the memories and cultural identities of huge segments of the population... for profit.

Nothing good comes from this.

If this holds up, then William Gibson should have a right to sue Microsoft for trademark infringement, as well as the Wachowskis. After all, their cultural memes came from Neuromancer.

I read it. Then I read it again. I can't help but laugh.
The paper doesn't address the main problem: that of conservation of energy. Why? because it doesn't explain where the photons are gaining directional mass-to-thrust equivalence. 180-degree separation along a probability curve should, even given their equations, result in a net thrust of 0 or close relative to the atom that emits the photons.[1]

In essence, they are suggesting the same kind of 'free energy borrowing' from the vacuum as is suggested for the explanation of CP-symmetry violation in the low-order probability variant of Kaon decay. Zero point energy. Also quantum gravity.

1 Taken from the 'What is Gravity' section of the publication. Paper 'glosses over' the fact that gravity is being conflated with the surface of EM drive without explaining how or why. See the explanation of the equation (labeled (3) )

This paper needs a LOT of additional theoretic explanation before it's going to be even close to explanatory.

Once RNN reaches a point of being able to validate sources and use human comment input from social authorities (individuals with high reputation for wisdom, education and intellect) then people will gravitate more. Trust in the major networks has declined over the years. http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...