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I can't decide whether you are trying to be funny or just a troll. But here is something for you to think about.

Survey Says: You're wrong.

Your lovely anecdotes appeals to a simplistic logic that doesn't stand up in the face of actual statistics.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/state_data/data_highlights/2006/index.htm

For every person that dies there are 20 people living with health issues as a result of smoking.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/smoking.htm

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/smoking.html

Education is a good thing: The better your education, the lower the chance that you will smoke, eat crap food, or engage in other lifestyle risks that are statistically proven to shorten or complicate your life in the long run.

Your post is not Insightful, except for those who want to support your short-sighted worldview that lifestyle of an individual doesn't impact the community as a whole.

Survey Says: You're wrong.

Your lovely anecdotes appeals to a simplistic logic that doesn't stand up in the face of actual statistics.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/state_data/data_highlights/2006/index.htm

For every person that dies there are 20 people living with health issues as a result of smoking.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/smoking.htm

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/smoking.html

Education is a good thing: The better your education, the lower the chance that you will smoke, eat crap food, or engage in other lifestyle risks that are statistically proven to shorten or complicate your life in the long run.

Your post is not Insightful, except for those who want to support your short-sighted worldview that lifestyle of an individual doesn't impact the community as a whole.

"Another major issue is that warming brings a massive increase in the range of mosquitoes and deadly mosquito-born diseases like malaria."

You know what? That's a major misconception. Have you ever been to Alaska? The mosquitoes there are worse than they are here in Minnesota, and here in Minnesota, the mosquitoes are worse than when I was in Indonesia. Sure, you might say that there are no malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the midwest (U.S.), but according to the CDC (and the WHO): "Before the twentieth century, much of the Midwest was endemic for malaria." http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no6/seys.htm According to wikipedia (haha, yeah, I know), the elimination of malaria in the U.S. was a combination mostly of public health efforts and, to some extent, the use of DDT.

I say the major reason we have come to associate malaria with the tropics is because people there are poorer and do not have the public health and sanitation or access to mosquito-control programs that we have in the developed world. While I certainly think that research on climate change should continue, we should really focus more on "loving our neighbor," and if we make some progress with fighting poverty, then we won't have to worry so much about the effects of global warming (not to say that we should ignore them!).

While you support your argument about lead poisoning, you offer nothing about the other two elements.

I'm guessing you're one of those that didn't vaccinate your children and avoid fluorinated water, even though all the peer reviewed research shows you're just putting your children at greater risk of disease and tooth decay, rather than decreasing any risk of autism. But while it's a guess, I'm basing it on your trying to link lead research to mercury and fluoride without proof.

I also suspect that you'll next say "but mercury is toxic!" and show a bunch of links about mercury toxicity as a red herring. Fine. But you can't come up with one reputable peer-reviewed link against fluoride in drinking water. And don't you dare try to say MMR vaccinations caused autism, because the long-term results are in.
ADHA on Fluoride
ADA on Fluoride

23 studies refuting MMR and autism link
CDC's website on MMR and autism

If I've gotten you all wrong (which I doubt, based on your anti-fluoride stance), then you have my apologies. Next time, support your argument.

"I don't want to have to deal with frikkin' malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and whatnot."

Sadly, that ship has sailed for many people. Maybe the Europeans are a bit more concerned than many Americans because of things like the Tiger Mosquito now found being across southern Europe, and Switzerland.

Residents of Rowenna, in Northern Italy, got to experience a disease I'd never even heard of. Chikungunya, a relative of Dengue Fever paid them a visit last December. Apparently it's normally found around the Indian Ocean.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/21/healthscience/virus.php

A quote from the article, "This is the first case of an epidemic of a tropical disease in a developed, European country," said Roberto Bertollini, director of the World Health Organization's Program on Health and the Environment. "Climate change creates conditions that make it easier for this mosquito to survive and it opens the door to diseases that didn't exist here previously. This is a real issue. Now, today. It is not something a crazy environmentalist is warning about."

According to the CDC, it's not usually fatal, but it completely sucks to contract it, and there is no vaccine or preventive drug currently available.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/Chikungunya/

OTOH, maybe the Europeans are a bit more concerned than many Americans because they seem, on average, to be more rational. Or their educational systems seem to suck less, or ???

Let something like Chikungunya and/or Malaria become endemic here, and I expect some attitudes will change, but we seem to require a high level of hosedness before we can change anything. I wonder if there isn't already enough climate change baked in that this is inevitable.

See: http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa

Centralizing that information takes away control from us as individuals.

I specifically stated that your medical records themselves would not be centralized and that your consent to release would be required and would further fall under the clinical discretion of each of your medical providers.

The only thing I was suggesting is that for emergency purposes, it would be possible to quickly locate records sources that you have explicitly authorized. Whether or not any particular situation meets your consent requirements to actually release the records is a totally different story, which was the whole point you so cleverly failed to understand.

A lot of people go get mental health care and pay out of their own pocket so that it isn't 'in the system'.

Your method of payment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your medical records and how they may -- or even MUST, with or without your consent (See: http://www.cdc.gov/ncphi/disss/nndss/PHS/infdis.htm ) -- be legally be released.

Sure, you can choose to go to witch doctors who keep no records to "stay off the grid." So what? Since the whole point of my post was "consent," what's your point? "I'm a super-secret rebel and I don't leave a paper trail?" Well, good for you, but what does that have to do with a single word of what I said?

In the northeast, going wireless is still rare.

There are other numbers in the survey worth looking at:

The prevalence of binge drinking among wireless-only adults (37.3%) was twice as high as the prevalence among adults living in landline households (17.7%)

Wireless-only adults were more likely to report that their health status was excellent or very good, and they were more likely to engage in regular leisure-time physical activity.

The percentage without health insurance coverage (28.7%) was twice as high as the percentage among adults living in landline households (13.7%)

Wireless-only adults were more likely to have experienced financial barriers to obtaining needed health care, and they were less likely to have a usual place to go for medical care. Wireless-only adults were also less likely to have received an influenza vaccination during the previous year.

Wireless-only adults (47.6%) were more likely than adults living in landline households (34.7%) to have ever been tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Selected Health Measures by Household Telephone Status:

There are obvious contradictions here.

The wireless population is young but doesn't look like the picture of health it claims to be.

As age increased, the percentage of adults living in households with only wireless telephones decreased: 15.5% for adults aged 30-44 years; 8.0% for adults aged 45-64 years; and 2.2% for adults aged 65 years and over

This is a much poorer and less stable a population than I expected. It rents but does not own. It has roommates not families. It is more inner-city than suburban or rural.

Wow. Your login handle pretty much says it all, "sumdumass". Using a 1996 study to try to support your conclusions that you'll live a great life smoking? According to the CDC, tobacco was the leading actual cause of death in the United States at 435,000 deaths in 2000. But if you don't believe me, take a trip to your local hospital. The majority of patients who are there for weeks or months on a chronic basis (because their health is too shitty to live outside the hospital) are there due to tobacco abuse, alcohol abuse, or being too fat and unfit for too long.

wow, I can tell your jealous and want the moniker pretty bad. First off, they can't trace tobacco to specific instances of illnesses. They can show a corelation to ilnesses among smokers and such, but anyone who is going to say that This or that caused the heart disease or cancer is a lying to you. It simply isn't true. They cannot, and let me repeat this, they cannot say that X caused that cancer or heart disease in anyone where X is one specific act. They can however say that a person who does X is Y time more likely to have the disease but they cannot confirm the diseases specific cause. Second, in 2005, heart disease was the largest cause of death. Cancer was the second leading cause. They take the average compared to the numbers or being more likely to get one of the related diseases and asume that those people got it by smoking. In some cases, they asks if you smoked and then automagically make the claim. But as we can see, there are about 773,403 people who had the same ilnesses that weren't attributed to tobacco but are considered tobacco related. But if you look at their reports, you will also see right where they say it is an estimate. They don't claim it to be a fact. You really need to pay attention to what your reading. Just like I never said I would have a wonderful life, I said I would live happy and die at the age I wanted to die.

Smoking is not a cause of death where you live a great, happy life for 60 years and then keel over the next day. No, many smokers don't die in their sleep of heart attacks from their chronic hypertension and consequent cardiac hypertrophy. They don't even die within a relatively short time period of 6 months to several years where cancerous growths grow unnoticed in their lungs and then spread to take over their bones (causing pathological fractures, and deep bone pain), brain (causing massive headaches, delirium and loss of senses and ability) or liver (picture bloating up with painful swellings all over the body, and going crazy from encephalopathy) before dying. No, they slowly destroy the airspaces of their own lungs, causing the body to overcompensate by sending more blood to the lungs. The increased blood flow causes liquid to leak out of the vessels, and over the space of ten to fifteen years or so, smokers will drown in their own bodily fluids, trailing oxygen canisters and fighting to get the energy required to get out of bed. The lucky ones die before lying in their own shit deteriorates their skin in their lower back and bottom, causing nonhealing sacral decubitus ulcers that will lead to wasting and chronic infections.

As long as I die around 70 years old or earlier, I don't care. And no, I wouldn't be carting a tank around. I would just go in peace.

But hey, keep deluding yourself into thinking that smoking will take the worst 10 years off your life. Because the reality is, not only will it shorten your lifespan, it will decrease your quality of life at the end substantially (unless any of the above actually sounds like fun to you). Take it from someone who deals with these people every day - throw out your cigarettes and don't join them.

As long as I refuse treatment, what you mentioned above will only las

Wow. Your login handle pretty much says it all, "sumdumass". Using a 1996 study to try to support your conclusions that you'll live a great life smoking? According to the CDC, tobacco was the leading actual cause of death in the United States at 435,000 deaths in 2000. But if you don't believe me, take a trip to your local hospital. The majority of patients who are there for weeks or months on a chronic basis (because their health is too shitty to live outside the hospital) are there due to tobacco abuse, alcohol abuse, or being too fat and unfit for too long.

wow, I can tell your jealous and want the moniker pretty bad. First off, they can't trace tobacco to specific instances of illnesses. They can show a corelation to ilnesses among smokers and such, but anyone who is going to say that This or that caused the heart disease or cancer is a lying to you. It simply isn't true. They cannot, and let me repeat this, they cannot say that X caused that cancer or heart disease in anyone where X is one specific act. They can however say that a person who does X is Y time more likely to have the disease but they cannot confirm the diseases specific cause. Second, in 2005, heart disease was the largest cause of death. Cancer was the second leading cause. They take the average compared to the numbers or being more likely to get one of the related diseases and asume that those people got it by smoking. In some cases, they asks if you smoked and then automagically make the claim. But as we can see, there are about 773,403 people who had the same ilnesses that weren't attributed to tobacco but are considered tobacco related. But if you look at their reports, you will also see right where they say it is an estimate. They don't claim it to be a fact. You really need to pay attention to what your reading. Just like I never said I would have a wonderful life, I said I would live happy and die at the age I wanted to die.

Smoking is not a cause of death where you live a great, happy life for 60 years and then keel over the next day. No, many smokers don't die in their sleep of heart attacks from their chronic hypertension and consequent cardiac hypertrophy. They don't even die within a relatively short time period of 6 months to several years where cancerous growths grow unnoticed in their lungs and then spread to take over their bones (causing pathological fractures, and deep bone pain), brain (causing massive headaches, delirium and loss of senses and ability) or liver (picture bloating up with painful swellings all over the body, and going crazy from encephalopathy) before dying. No, they slowly destroy the airspaces of their own lungs, causing the body to overcompensate by sending more blood to the lungs. The increased blood flow causes liquid to leak out of the vessels, and over the space of ten to fifteen years or so, smokers will drown in their own bodily fluids, trailing oxygen canisters and fighting to get the energy required to get out of bed. The lucky ones die before lying in their own shit deteriorates their skin in their lower back and bottom, causing nonhealing sacral decubitus ulcers that will lead to wasting and chronic infections.

As long as I die around 70 years old or earlier, I don't care. And no, I wouldn't be carting a tank around. I would just go in peace.

But hey, keep deluding yourself into thinking that smoking will take the worst 10 years off your life. Because the reality is, not only will it shorten your lifespan, it will decrease your quality of life at the end substantially (unless any of the above actually sounds like fun to you). Take it from someone who deals with these people every day - throw out your cigarettes and don't join them.

As long as I refuse treatment, what you mentioned above will only las

How does one group have the right to tell the other group how and where to be?

Trying to pretend they're comparable is insane. What next, "balancing" the rights of people who like to shoot others and people who don't like to be shot?

Much as your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins, your right to smoke ends where my lungs begin. If you don't like that, figure out how to make smokeless cigarettes.

It's very true that athletic peoples' bodies burn more calories, but that does not necessarily correlate to their eating more calories than other people.

Take two people, one who rides a bike two hours a day and one who does not. Two hours on a bike at 15 mph (24.1 kph) burns about 1600 calories. (Don't scoff at this as an implausible amount of exercise, I personally do this.) Your argument would state that the athlete must eat 1600 more calories than the other person. But the non-athlete might eat the same amount of calories as the athlete. They just do not burn it off, resulting in obesity. Why is it that, on average, the people in industrialized countries gain a pound every year starting on their 30th birthday? Because people consume more than they require. Athletes eat the same amount of food as other people, they just burn all of it and simultaneously improve their health. (They tend to eat higher quality food, as well.)

It is also an outrageous fiction that athletes are a bigger drain on the health care system than the obese. "(Athletes) are a bigger drain on the health care system (than the average person) due to sports related injuries." What statistic you used to deduce that fact?!? Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer are the top four killers known to medicine. They are also the four most expensive. Every single one is massively exacerbated by the sedentary lifestyle, coupled with overeating (esp. of the wrong foods) that leads to obesity. These are long term, degenerative diseases which cost more money the longer they go on. Heart disease alone costs the United States over $400 billion dollars a year. High blood pressure? Over $60 billion. (Source: CDC) There is no way that sports medicine costs even 1/10th that figure.

But okay, let's take sports medicine. Obese people put tons of additional pressure on their joints. While there are few detailed analyses of how much obesity contributes to the overall trend, one Canadian study of 17,000 patients found that 9 in 10 who had knee replacements and 7 in 10 who had hip replacements in that country in 2004 were overweight. Sure, an athlete will tear an ACL or require some physical therapy to fix some nagging problem, but it is many orders of magnitude more insignificant than obesity and inactivity in terms of costs and resources.

I did point out that a corpse of a person who had a contagious disease is dangerous. Does not change the fact that the effort required to try to bury the dead is far better applied elsewhere, or the fact that burying the dead in a hurry leads to haphazard burials where the corpses can contaminate the water table. If you find that there was a cholera epidemic in Burma when the storm hit, then you have identified an even more disastrous scenario than is being projected in the media. Do you have any such evidence, or are you just trying to challenge what I said? Because I'm not only speaking from experience (as a trained and sadly experienced relief worker), but also conveying information that comes from colleagues of mine who work in epidemiology, and presuming that you do not have an anti-government reflex, the Center for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization.

http://www.cdc.gov/Ncidod/eid/13/1/1.htm
http://www.who.int/bookorders/WHP/detart1.jsp?sesslan=1&codlan=1&codcol=63&codcch=167

Just out of curiosity, do you have any experience as a first responder in a disaster zone?
The way you dismiss burying the dead as "simple and easy" makes me doubt it. It's anything but simple and easy, it's a labor-intensive effort that puts more people in contact with the corpses than is necessary.

As someone with a congenital heart defect and damage to the Sinoatrial node http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinus_node of my heart, this scares the piss out of me. Letting a company use the courts to legislate that their product doesn't cause or contribute to the death of people it's used on turns logic on its head. The last thing I want is some idiot with a taser to zap me with it just because I won't bow to his demands.

This should scare you, too. There are about 90 million people http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/heart.htm in the U.S. alone who have a diagnosed heart conditions that range from mild to severe. Add to that people who have not been diagnosed, yet have a heart problem, one-third to one-half the U.S. population could be susceptible to cardiac arrest if they are tased.

I hope the doctors and scientists find iron-clad evidence so that this issue can be put to bed and tasers will be considered the lethal weapons they are.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/default.htm

Recent experience with EV71 epidemic disease also evokes a sense of déjà vu for those familiar with the history of poliomyelitis, he notes; 100 years ago, few had heard of the disease, and only a few geographically and temporally separate outbreaks had occurred over several decades in developing countries. "But over time, these outbreaks increased in frequency and size and ultimately evolved into the major epidemics that swept through cities in Northern Europe and North America in the first half of the 20th century.

"Do the recent epidemics in Southeast Asia portend annual summertime outbreaks in North America and other regions that have thus far been spared large-scale outbreaks of neurotropic enterovirus 71 infection? Without a crystal ball, it would be presumptuous to make predictions," Dr. Modlin concludes. "However, if history is any guide, it would also be foolish not to be better prepared than we are now. It would be prudent to add enterovirus 71 to the list of emerging infections that threaten us, develop a plan to respond to an outbreak, and take the first steps toward developing a vaccine."

But they're CHILDREN.

Anybody who found this comment excessively callous or crass, please see the number of pediatric influenza deaths in the United States on this page:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

If you look at this chart:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2007-2008/IPD17.htm

you will see that it is not uncommon for their to be 15-20 child flu deaths in a two week period.

But they're CHILDREN.

Anybody who found this comment excessively callous or crass, please see the number of pediatric influenza deaths in the United States on this page:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

If you look at this chart:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2007-2008/IPD17.htm

you will see that it is not uncommon for their to be 15-20 child flu deaths in a two week period.

You have proven that guns kill people. Congratulations.

Duh.

Of course guns kill people. That's all they're capable of doing. That is what they are designed to do, period. So of course you can find statistics that relatively a large number of people are killed by guns in what is, by far, the largest country with any significant gun ownership. This should be obvious to you.

Your statistics say nothing about how many crimes they stop. Your statistics say nothing about how many people are killed by other things when guns are not available.

Does the good outweigh the bad? I think so. I can't prove it, of course, but I think so.

But even assuming I'm wrong, the fact that 11,344 people are killed by guns in the US every year is not a proof of such. It's barely a data point.

48 thousand people were killed in car accidents in 2004 (page 33). Let's ban cars!

If you want to prove that guns are a problem, you'll have to sit down and figure out exactly what good it is that they provide, quantize that, and compare it to the harm. Also, remember to not include deaths that would have been caused by other means if guns weren't available, appropriately pro-rated by likelihood. Good luck, because you'll need it.

Processed meat in particular seems tied to cancer and red meat seems tied to heart disease.

Straw man argument. First of all, you're gonna die. Just like the rest of us. You have to die of "something".

In the US, the two major causes of death are heart disease and cancer. To state that eating processed meat is the proximate cause of both diseases is really pushing things. I note that you said "tied to ... " but my point remains. It's really unclear that eating processed meat is a major variable in these processes. Now, if you want to talk about ingestion of high amounts of nitrate-laden meat products and it's relationship to stomach cancer (thousands of links, Google it...)you're on higher ground.

Need some stats to glue you to that posh office chair you're sitting in? Try the CDC for mortality statistics http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm and watch how botnets blur into needless crap worthy of Fox News.

On the other hand, you are only hearing about the botnets that are reported! The ones that stay stealthy and only do a little espionage now and then are not reported... say from the USAF Cyber Defense Command!? Since MS et al are so cozy with the NSA these bots probably don't even register with detection software packages.

As stated, watch some port 25 traffic to see if you are spewing spam everywhere. Who knows what port the really nasty botnets are using. No, it's not tin foil I'm wearing on my head!!

Just because you're paranoid does NOT mean they are not out to get you. We've seen cable cuts, military attacks on various other-country establishments, industrial espionage from Israel, Chinese cyber attacks and all manner of oddities on the Internet.

I said it first: Recession will make the Internet more important than it is now. Cyber attackers will mature, and their attacks and goals will change also. Identity theft is peanuts if you can get inside a bank, a federal bank etc.

Think of it... 25 cents per transaction run through a large backend company for Visa? THAT is big money. Doesn't have to be a credit card company either.. just a large institution. Say the billing system of your local electric company gets hacked, and 25 cents per bill is being funneled off to Estonia? If you think it couldn't happen and is not happening, remind yourself how torture in the USA couldn't happen either!

I dunno, maybe this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Notable_Shootings

and this ?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4371403.stm

or even this from the US CDC ? (its 10 years old now, but I doubt the rates have changed that much)

http://www.cdc.gov/MMWR/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm#00002255.htm

If you're ok with the population of a medium-sized town disappearing every year due to Americans shooting other Americans, then I guess you don't have a gun problem - but where I come from we dont have metal detectors and armed security in our public high schools, and 200 odd people (out of 20 million) died from a firearm last year. Thats 1 per 100,000 vs 1 per 10,000 for the US. Theres an order of magnitude difference.

According to http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/thimerosal.htm it is still used in all flu vaccines. Other vaccines contain none or trace amounts as it is being phased out. Virtually all parents are encouraged to get their children vaccinated.

Vaccines aren't the only place where you find mercury by the way, and anything that has mercury is certainly a problem.

I'm not taking sides on vaccines in the debate, I'm just stating the fact that mercury is still used in trace amounts in many vaccines, and liberally in flu vaccines. It is also used in most dental amalgams. I work with mercury on a daily basis, and have very good reasons for believing it is worth avoiding. The fact that mercury may cause learning disabilities doesn't strike me as impossible at all. It's already proven to cause a whole host of central nervous issues and learning disabilities.

"...in the Tuskegee program to infect Black people with syphilis to study how to destroy their society."

http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/jul/tuskegee/

They were untreated, not infected by the Tuskegee program. It's no less atrocious, but let's get the facts correct. I've seen this error repeated on slashdot.

Cats often are infected with a parasite called toxoplasmosis, which exposure to, has been linked to schizophrenia in humans.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no11/03-0143.htm

Many cat owners are infected with a parasite called toxoplasmosis. When toxo gets into mice brains, it can affect their thinking, making them less afraid of cats.
    Several studies are indicating a strong link to schizophrenia in humans with toxo.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no11/03-0143.htm

"Crazy" as in "Schizophrenia". Straight from the CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol9no11/03-0143.htm

Recent epidemiologic studies indicate that infectious agents may contribute to some cases of schizophrenia. In animals, infection with Toxoplasma gondii can alter behavior and neurotransmitter function. In humans, acute infection with T. gondii can produce psychotic symptoms similar to those displayed by persons with schizophrenia. Since 1953, a total of 19 studies of T. gondii antibodies in persons with schizophrenia and other severe psychiatric disorders and in controls have been reported; 18 reported a higher percentage of antibodies in the affected persons; in 11 studies the difference was statistically significant. Two other studies found that exposure to cats in childhood was a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia.

T. gondii is an intracellular parasite in the phylum Apicomplexa. Its life cycle can be completed only in cats and other felids, which are the definitive hosts. However, T. gondii also infects a wide variety of intermediate hosts, including humans. In many mammals, T. gondii is known to be an important cause of abortions and stillbirths and to selectively infect muscle and brain tissue. A variety of neurologic symptoms, including incoordination, tremors, head-shaking, and seizures, have been described in sheep, pigs, cattle, rabbits, and monkeys infected with T. gondii (2).

Kopi Luwak (pronounced [kopi luwak]) or Civet coffee is coffee made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus). The civets eat the berries, but the beans inside pass through their system undigested. This process takes place on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago, and in the Philippines (where the product is called Kape Alamid). Vietnam has a similar type of coffee, called weasel coffee, which are coffee berries which have been defecated by local weasels. In actuality the "weasel" is just the local version of the Asian Palm Civet.

It would be better also because the data (which shows 10.7 years) is for age 75, so if he made it to 77 he would have already crossed a hurdle. He would be 77.5 though and with 85.7 being the life expectancy at age 75, that would give him almost exactly 8 years. Anyway the point is not to try and find the date of his death, which is impossible, but simply to point out that it would be a very real possibility. There's a big difference in health between 65 year olds and 75 year olds.

"I also have to wonder about brain damage as another side effect."

Killing other people definitely damages a person mentally, and is definitely likely to cause the person to have trouble sleeping.

I've never known anyone who slept only 7 hours a day who seemed as alert and calm as people who sleep 9 hours a day. I think the problem is worse than they say.

Why did Slashdot editor Zonk link to that story about the CDC? I found this in about a minute: National Sleep Awareness Week, March 3--9, 2008. Quote from the CDC: "The National Sleep Foundation recommends that healthy adults sleep 7--9 hours daily."

Do Slashdot editors lose any sleep over poorly written, edited, and considered stories?

The story linked by Slashdot is from an automatic news release publisher in Australia. At the bottom of every page it says "powered by computer". Why not link to the source? Why link to a company that says, "Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now When you subscribe get a 12 months license for LiveProject Valued at $99 USD"?

See the links to the left and right of this story: Sleep and Sleep Disorders: A Public Health Challenge.

Do people in the U.S. lose sleep over the fact that they are forced to pay to kill Iraqis? Will people in the U.S. lose sleep when they realize that the huge rise in prices, which has already started, is mostly timed for the end of Dick Cheney's and George W. Bush's terms in office? Whether or not they lose sleep, killing Iraqis definitely lowers the quality of life in the United States.

"I also have to wonder about brain damage as another side effect."

Killing other people definitely damages a person mentally, and is definitely likely to cause the person to have trouble sleeping.

I've never known anyone who slept only 7 hours a day who seemed as alert and calm as people who sleep 9 hours a day. I think the problem is worse than they say.

Why did Slashdot editor Zonk link to that story about the CDC? I found this in about a minute: National Sleep Awareness Week, March 3--9, 2008. Quote from the CDC: "The National Sleep Foundation recommends that healthy adults sleep 7--9 hours daily."

Do Slashdot editors lose any sleep over poorly written, edited, and considered stories?

The story linked by Slashdot is from an automatic news release publisher in Australia. At the bottom of every page it says "powered by computer". Why not link to the source? Why link to a company that says, "Get stories like this delivered daily - FREE - subscribe now When you subscribe get a 12 months license for LiveProject Valued at $99 USD"?

See the links to the left and right of this story: Sleep and Sleep Disorders: A Public Health Challenge.

Do people in the U.S. lose sleep over the fact that they are forced to pay to kill Iraqis? Will people in the U.S. lose sleep when they realize that the huge rise in prices, which has already started, is mostly timed for the end of Dick Cheney's and George W. Bush's terms in office? Whether or not they lose sleep, killing Iraqis definitely lowers the quality of life in the United States.

35 errors per day is actually a pretty significant error rate. There are about (8.26 / 1000 / year * 301,139,947 * 1 day) = 6810 deaths per day in the US, so they are entering or receiving about one out of every 200 records incorrectly. This means that about ((35 / day) / 301,139,947 * 77.8 year) = .0033 or one in every three hundred people will be incorrectly marked dead during their lifetime if this error rate continues.

"More importantly, the less likely disease vectors (accidents, rape) are not enough to cause an epidemic. So such vaccines should be available (maybe even subsidized), but not mandatory."

But it's already an epidemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 50 percent of sexually active men and women become infected with Human Papillomavirus (HPV) at some point in their lives. Because the virus is so pervasive, by age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired genital HPV infection.
http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm#common

Now if people would stop being such political TWATS about a HEALTH issue, maybe we could put a stop to the third leading cause of cancer in women.

FRC and Focus on the Family are dangerous, murderous organizations that want you *dead* if you "sin." They and their ilk are the Taliban, right here in the good ol' USA.

--
BMO

"1) is there now a known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox?"

Just a few years ago, they thought that it would last 18-20 years. Just long enough to put every child that got it as recommended by the CDC at the point that they are uninsured and in a high risk taking group. Today they are saying ~5 years.

There is one known lifetime vaccine for chicken pox. It is called getting chicken pox. Actually catching the disease is the only known way to gain lifelong immunity.

I don't have good story on hand. The problem is that the CDC and the AMA recommend the vaccine for everyone. Once that happens, you are not likely to see a lot of dessent. Particularly when there is so much money to be made by supporting the recommendation. Here is a link to a document on the CDC's site that points out that the death rate from chicken pox prior to the vaccine was 100 per year. According to NASA, there are more people hit by lightning each than that and 92 a year of the strikes are fatal. We don't see a nationl push to start dressing our population in rubber suits. That and avoiding a lightning strike does not increase your odds of being killed by lightning later in life. No one is disagreeing that catching chicken pox as an adult is WAY more dangerous than as a kid. The pro-vaccine folks are just not discussing it at all.

Now, I don't suggest you take my word for it. Go to the very people that are recommending the vaccine. Just don't accept their recommendation. Look at their core data. Run the numbers yourself. Then ask yourself the appropriate questions. Does the immediate risk prevention outweigh the long term increase in risk. Is the chances of death REALLY more than what I take on a daily basis with hundreds of other activities I do? Is my child likely to be insured and able to afford to keep getting boosters for the rest of their life? Is my child going to actually go through the effort of keeping up on the booster shots for the rest of their life? Is the increased risk of adult death for my child worth the money I can make by not missing a weeks worth of work? Is it important enough to me that the public school gets that extra weeks worth of funding for my child not missing a week due to illness?

I don't know where you live, but I believe in most of the US, and definitly in California in particular, the chicken pox vaccine is mostly required for admittance to public schools. While they cannot force you to get the vaccine, the conversation goes like this:

School: Chicken Pox vaccines are required to attend school.
Parent: But I don't want my kid to get the vaccine.
School: Well, too bad. It's the law.
99.9% of parents: Ohhhh... Ok. I'll get my kid the vaccine.
00.1% of parents: No. It is illegal for you to require it. Either you will admit my child, or we will address this in a courtroom.
After that point, either the school has you sign a waiver and admits your child, or you actually have to hire a lawyer to get your child in school. You also have the option of home schooling, but, again, your talking about a very small percentage.

Contracting the chicken pox as a child is not the problem, because, as you clarified, if you are going to die from chicken pox, it is not really relevant as to how you caught it, and chicken pox is contagious enough that you are very likely to catch it eventually. You are also correct that the vaccine doesn't "CAUSE" chicken pox later in life. That is part of where the bad science comes in. It is taking representing the wrong question while technically being true. Whether chicken pox "CAUSES" chicken pox later in life is totally irrelevant to most people. What people really want to know, and what they think they are being told is "Are you more likely to die of chicken pox if you do not get the vaccine." We know that your chances of dieing from chicken pox as an adult is dramatically greater than if you are a healthy child. We also know that the chicken pox vaccine is a temporary measure. This leads to the fact that if you put off getting chicken pox until adulthood, you either have to be on a permanent medical regiment or you are now vulnerable to a highly contagious, common, life threatening disease. 3 years ago, they believed it would last for ~18-20 years. Now, they are finding it lasts ~5 years. 5 is actually better, as it is more likely that the kids will actually catch it.

While the CBC may not be recommending it, the CDC does. The wording a couple of years ago was dramatically stronger.

The problem with the booster is that when parents are bullied into getting their kids the vaccine, they now set them up for a lifetime of requiring medicine to keep from dieing. This is the stuff from sci-fi horror films.

Thimerosal hasn't been used in childhood vaccines since 2001. http://www.cdc.gov/od/science/iso/concerns/thimerosal.htm

But what they lack is perspective, judgment, experience, and a sense of the consequences of their actions. To wit: teens are 4 times as likely as other drivers to be involved in a motor vehicle accident. This lack of experience & judgment might be called "dumb" colloquially but in reality is simply a fact that in homo sapiens, the section of the brain that implements these functions- the pre-frontal cortex- tends to develop later on average. Again, individual cases vary. And before you make the argument that we should treat everyone on a case by case basis; I would point out that with publicly-funded institutions like schools and courts we simply don't have the resources, nor necessarily do most families want that kind of uncertainty. For teens in exceptional circumstances there is emancipation.

The cases you describe- self sufficient teens- are pretty rare. The anecdotes you cite hint at selection bias. There certainly are many cases of extraordinary teens, either mature beyond their years or possessing skills that would make adults envious. But these are interesting precisely because they deviate from the norm.

Adults are often too hard on teenagers and (as a parent of a 16yo son) I can say that it is difficult to balance issues of power and authority in your interpersonal relationship with your child, with the child's need to develop into a self-sufficient independent adult. For instance, I own a house; it doesn't matter that my son has "his" room; he may not do "anything he wants" with it as it affects the value of my considerable real estate investment. He intellectually is capable of understanding this but his actions show either a lack of understanding of consequences or a lack of caring for the consequences. This is, I understand, typical for a teen, but can be a source of friction as I have to enforce rules such as "clean up after yourself" that he finds oppressive. He feels that he should have sovereignty over a piece of the house that I own, but even his recent history (last two weeks) indicates that he is unable to follow that simple house rule, so he's subject to periodic quick inspections, with lots of advance notice, which he still feels are invasions of his space.

In the online space we have a growing number of teens (and adults) who are unaware (or just don't care) that their "free speech" causes real harm. Adults don't get to say whatever they want; if teens want to be treated as adults and given adult rights then they must accept that responsibilities are concomitant. As an aside, I am sick of people of all ages whining about their right to free speech as justification for the most outrageous behavior- slander/libel, posting people's addresses online to invite harassment or violence, etc. Free speech is not an absolute as the Supreme Court has ruled numerous times, and saying stupid, mean or illegal things has consequences, whether they are legal or social. In many ways the internet is the worst possible place to say irresponsible things because it has such a long memory, but then again we are talking about teens and I am asserting that, on average, teens lack the judgment of adults.

If the USA gets socialized medicine then where will Canadians go to get good health care instead of the meat grinder that is the Canadian health care system?

They will go to Canada. But I guess it depends, if they need a kidney they can always go to India or the Philippines and buy one from either naive victims or unwilling patients. The free market for medical care will always be available for the rich. And no there is no meat grinder here.

When the government steps in and starts dictating how much hospitals/doctors/etc can make then it's a disincentive to go to school a third of your life for that profession.

The government here already dictates how much doctors and nurses, etc get paid. On rare occasions there is grumbling, and in the end everybody settles. There is no shortage of doctors here. In some rural communities yes; but these communities can and often do offer incentives, like free housing for example.

And in the US there is HMO's, which from what I have heard, is a locked-in and rationed system of health care governed by the financial profits of insurance companies.

Also if we put cost caps on medication the same way that Canada does then our R&D will go down the tubes because the huge profit won't be available for the rare hit that decent drugs can be.

There is a healthy biotech industry in Canada. Companies can choose not to locate here, and companies can choose not to sell drugs to Canadians.

Here are some medical and pharmaceutical companies who have found it worth while to be in socialized-medicine Canada:
http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Health_Care/Pharmaceuticals/

I work 80 hours a week, and live on a tight budget and spend a lot on health care, and my family gets great care.

I work 40 hours a week and have a shitty low paying job and I don't spend a lot on health care and my family gets great care.

Why the hell should someone who won't get off their ass to better their income and who spends all their income on things like lotto tickets, new cars, and big screen TV's drag down my health care so that I'm not "advantaged".

You are being presumptuous. I have never met anybody who wanted to "sit on their ass" and be poor. I certainly have never met anybody who is "poor" that owns luxury items like big screen TV's. In my province at least, the welfare system is rather rigorous. There are some working-class asshats here who think poor people are just ripping off the system. I have seen no statistics or evidence of this. If in fact they are doing it, then they will get caught. Bank records, net assets, job search history, etc. are all surveyed by the people responsible for rationing the money here.

This whole "fair" health care thing doesn't lift everyone up to great health care, it just drags everyone down to poor health care.

Not according to this study:

In the survey, people were asked to rate their health from poor to excellent, and 85 percent of Americans and 88 percent of Canadians reported that they were in good, very good or excellent health.

Although there is a slight (and I would argue insignificant advantage for the US):
Americans were slightly more likely than Canadians to rate their health as excellent (26 percent compared to 24 percent).

And for uninsured Americans:

Among uninsured American respondents, 28 percent said the quality of the health care services they received was "excellent," 44 percent "good," and 28 percent "fair" or "poor."

Also:

Unmet medical needs during the past 12 months were reported by 13 percent of Americans and 11 percent

We don't have a gun culture, what we have is a culture of media-ocrity. Kids spend more time watching television than going to school and the media exalts violence and commercialism. Lately it's been getting slutted up too. Anyone who says that watching eight hours of mass-media television a day won't rot your brain is obviously a dillhole, every system except for a few involving bacteria are garbage in, garbage out all the way. Any "gun culture" you may have believed existed is just an offshoot of our "media culture". It's part of the public paranoia promoted by a news media that shows us only the sensationalistic crap that will ensure their ratings because we as a people have shown that we react well to being shown bright and shiny things.

If we really had a "gun culture" problem then we'd have more firearm deaths than alcohol deaths or auto deaths. In 2001 (easy stats to find) we have around 75,000 alcohol deaths, ~40,000 auto accident deaths, and 29,573 firearms deaths, 57% of which were suicides - which means that they could as easily have been slit wrists or heads in the oven, assuming the statistic is correct. (ho ho)

As you can see from that last link, the total number of deaths is falling over time, and the percentage of suicide is rising... and of course the population is rising in this country. So uh... it looks like what gun problems we have - and there are problems, just as there are problems with knives, and there were problems with swords and bows before them, are being worked out.

So sorry, I don't see your gun culture bit. Guns are tools meant for killing, and we enshrine violence. Guns are just a symptom. They're the most convenient way to kill someone, so of course we're going to use them. Get rid of them and you'll just see more stabbings and stranglings.

According to the CDC (pdf) suicide is the third leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 15-24, and 8.4% of students in grade 9-12 reported making at least one suicide attempt in the past 12 months. Legislation against online bullying isn't going to help at all, but thanks to the overwhelming media coverage for this case we'll probably get it anyway. And no doubt it will use subtle wording that will make it applicable in a broad range of cases, "for the children".

After all, it's so much easier to treat a symptom than it is the underlying causes of teen suicide.

This means that it's only over a long time that survivability and evolutionary changes can play a role. OK, in the software world a long time is measured in the scale of minutes to a few years - but in the matter of living things like humans it's best measured in generations. A change that occurred many generations ago induced a gene that causes the disorder Hemochromatosis. This was a useful gene for people when the food was very low in iron, but today we have food with a lot of iron and therefore this gene is a bad thing. However in this case the treatment is very simple compared to many other diseases and disorders.

The same goes for computer programs - a feature that is essential for the usability in one generation can be a really big problem in the upcoming generations. It may also be that a feature may be useful in the short term, like the ability to call out warnings. Unfortunately when humans are involved warnings tends to lose their edge over time, but the computer software will not understand this. So in that perspective all those warnings that Vista bloats us with are useless.

As for the canoe example - the canoes used by the pacific islanders are completely different from canoes for river use. And they have the sibling the Kayak, which is very useful for the environment where it originated, but it's not so useful when it comes to long-distance travel. Differences in material used is also important. The materials used by a Kayak may not survive for long close to the equator (it may draw sharks) while it is the best solution for arctic environments.

So the conclusion is that there is no perfect canoe - it depends very much on where it is used, and sometimes an insignificant difference between two individuals may be irrelevant in any other environment than the precise home environment of the specific canoe where it may prove a very useful feature.

Same goes for humans. In central Africa people tends to have large noses while in arctic regions the nose is small. The reason is that a large nose can allow for more heat to escape while a person is breathing while a small one is useful for conserving the heat.

Or are we /.'ers different from most citizens, and if so, why?

Several reasons, actually:

• Many of us realize that the choice isn't between liberty and effective counter-terrorism. The choice is between liberty and a security illusion meant to make people feel safer.
• Knowing that we aren't actually becoming safer, it is much easier for us to realize how scary it is to be placing these kinds of powers in the hands of people who are already blatantly corrupt and whose interests clearly lie contrary to the public's.
• There is a fair amount of skepticism that anything beyond simply locking cockpit doors on airplanes is a necessary response to 9/11. Even if you could convince us that we are actually more secure, it could still be a hard sell that the additional security is worth the cost in liberty.
• There are many other causes of death in our country besides terrorism that vastly outweigh the losses suffered on 9/11... on a yearly basis. Why haven't we taken any steps to solve those? Why is a single event where 3,000 people died cause to go batshit insane protective give-up-our-liberties mode, when Heart Disease causes over 200 times that many deaths on a yearly basis, and we can't convince ourselves to hit up a gym?