Month: June 2016

How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

Source: How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

Republicans and Democrats of 2016 have neither intelligible boundaries nor enforceable norms. As a result, renegade political behavior pays.

What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome. Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. … Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction.

The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise. … They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. … So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties.

Continue reading How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

In Newly Created Life-Form, A Major Mystery | Quanta Magazine

The result is a tiny organism named syn3.0 that contains just 473 genes.
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But it is unclear what the remaining 149 genes do.

Venter is careful to avoid calling syn3.0 a universal minimal cell. If he had done the same set of experiments with a different microbe, he points out, he would have ended up with a different set of genes.
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In 2010, David Ussery, a biologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and his collaborators compared 1,000 genomes. They found that not a single gene is shared across all of life. “There are different ways to have a core set of instructions,” Szostak said.

Source: In Newly Created Life-Form, A Major Mystery | Quanta Magazine

Tech Companies Fight Back After Years of Being Deluged With Secret FBI Requests – The Intercept

Last year, the FBI issued nearly 13,000 national security letters. Only a handful, including the three redacted Yahoo letters, have been disclosed in any form to the public — because each letter comes with a gag order attached.

Source: Tech Companies Fight Back After Years of Being Deluged With Secret FBI Requests – The Intercept

Important infos about app.seafile.de and licensing purchases through our web shops – Seafile

PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as all our customers’ files for illegal content. They have also asked us to provide them with detailed statistics about the files types of our customers sync and share on https://app.seafile.de

Since complying with this demand would violate German / European data protection laws (and also be morally wrong in our opinion) we have declined to comply with this demand.

Source: Important infos about app.seafile.de and licensing purchases through our web shops – Seafile

Silicon Valley’s Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes And Sizzles Like Meat : The Salt : NPR

It’s not the only faux meat company selling bloody plant patties. Last month, Los Angeles-based Beyond Meat made headlines when it released the Beyond Burger
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Beyond Meat’s investors include Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Gates is also backing Impossible Foods.

Source: Silicon Valley’s Bloody Plant Burger Smells, Tastes And Sizzles Like Meat : The Salt : NPR