The UK is a major offender with GCHQ, but our government has been shamingly successful in closing down debate on the issue compared with what's happening in the US. The main response from our wonderful government has been to threaten the Guardian. This in a country where (happily) you still don't risk life and limb by opposing the government. The sad fact is that people here don't care about their freedom as much as Americans do.
As I often point out to the pretty numerous people I meet who object to some new lunacy in American politics - you may complain about this, but whatever you think about [whatever], be sure there are Americans who care just as much about [whatever] and are actually trying to do something about it.
Given that TFA is only using leprosy as a metaphor, I suppose this is, strictly, off-topic.
But I have to say, in the many countries where leprosy hasn't gone away, there are still plenty of very real, non-metaphorical leper colonies. I know because I'm an eye surgeon who used to work in Africa, and I've been involved in outreach trips to operate on cataracts in leper colonies. If we hadn't arranged the trips, the people would have had no chance of getting their sight back. Nobody much cares about them.
To clarify, the non-fact-checker I'm dissing is Janis Ian, not cervesaebraciator, whose comments are highly sensible (I reckon) and who has made a good catch in finding the Janis Ian quote. Evidently a fact-checker.
Anybody who thinks James Joyce was antisemitic plainly hasn't done the research - in particular, hasn't read Ulysses. Or even seen a synopsis of the plot...
General point is right, though. Which proves that even people who don't bother checking facts get it right sometimes.
Not difficult to construct a list of horrible people who made great novels, great poetry, great art... but then only people who think that Art can play the role of morality or religion should be surprised.
I was scrolling down to see if anyone had beaten me to Alexei Panshin. Drat.
"Rite of Passage" is one of the great science fiction novels. There isn't anything very groundbreaking from the science angle but the characterisation and plot are brilliant.
My teenage daughter assumed that Panshin must be female because his teenage girl protagonist is so believable. Her gradual (partial) transcending of her own cultural blindness is excellently done, and the way Panshin manages to use her as a highly sympathetic POV character from what turns out to be a really quite disturbing culture is done with a lot of subtlety.
There is a Befunge program for chess which is 1.5KB, and plays legally at least. Proof either of the great ingenuity of the human race or of the fact that some people have way too much time on their hands.
No, they conquered the market by abusing their dominance of the desktop OS market to crush competition, by twisting the arm of vendors to make them ship all their computers with the MS inferior product preinstalled.
If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss. It wasn't.
Possibly you also believe that Windows' stranglehold on the desktop is due to the intrinsic virtues of the OS too?
This has been disgracefully overhyped by all the news media that I've seen that have picked it up, often in very similar words, suggesting that the ultimate blame lies with the original press release.
The fact is that the technique hasn't even been *tried* yet on Macular Degeneration, much less been shown to actually work.
All that's been done is some studies on a quite different disease for which quite effective treatments already exist.
The history of efforts to treat Macular Degeneration is full of false hopes, and it is desperately cruel to grieving patients and relatives to put out seriously premature press releases like this. I am an eye surgeon specialising in these conditions and I had to deal with some very upset people because of this only today.
Prof Marshall is a very eminent figure in the development of laser treatments for eye disease, but if he had much to do with the way this has been presented to the media he should do some hard thinking about his responsibilities.
There's a brief press release about this on the website of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (British eye surgeons' professional organisation)
http://www.rcophth.ac.uk/about/press/
Caldera (before the turn to the dark side) in a 1 G partition on the family desktop.
I kept practically everything on the much bigger Win 98 partition and mounted it at boot.
Second install was an ancient incarnation of RedHat (6 I think) on an old Toshiba laptop.
Had to use framebuffer for the graphics for months before I got X to run properly.
It was great.
I've never used Windows since.
Installing modern distros is just too easy...
You remember right about the retina being "inside out". However...
There's actually a potential space between the photoreceptors (rods and cones)and the outermost layer of the retina, the pigment epithelium. This is the level at which the retina comes loose in retinal detachment.
The way you do this is not to get between the photoreceptors and the nerve fibre layer (which would cause total loss of vision in that part of the retina) but between the photoreceptors and the pigment epithelium, essentially by making a limited retinal detachment on purpose.
This is major league eye surgery (very much more so than a cataract operation, for example) which could only be carried out by a highly trained subspecialist in retinal surgery (this is one of the ways in which the publicity handout from Moorfields is pretty misleading).
If this technique proves valuable when it finally gets trialled (and that's by no means inevitable - there have been a great many false hopes over the years in treating this miserable disease) actually getting the treatment for everbody who needs it will be a huge logistical problem. This is a disease which eventually affects every third person in Western countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Too right. Have a virtual modpoint. (I see you've rightly acquired lots of real ones, so I don't feel too bad.)
Me. I am Spartacus.
You can tell how crap the arguments against staying in the EU are by the way UKIP has to appeal to xenophobia instead of facts.
Talking of facts:
http://www.cream-migration.org...
Exactly so. The actual article says "millions" though. Perhaps the submitter himself didn't read TFA?
"which entered our ancestors' genomes thousands of years ago"
Millions. One might hope that errors of three orders of magnitude would be uncommon on Slashdot.
Man's right.
The UK is a major offender with GCHQ, but our government has been shamingly successful in closing down debate on the issue compared with what's happening in the US. The main response from our wonderful government has been to threaten the Guardian. This in a country where (happily) you still don't risk life and limb by opposing the government. The sad fact is that people here don't care about their freedom as much as Americans do.
As I often point out to the pretty numerous people I meet who object to some new lunacy in American politics - you may complain about this, but whatever you think about [whatever], be sure there are Americans who care just as much about [whatever] and are actually trying to do something about it.
You mean until 1453. (Ask any Greek)
Given that TFA is only using leprosy as a metaphor, I suppose this is, strictly, off-topic.
But I have to say, in the many countries where leprosy hasn't gone away, there are still plenty of very real, non-metaphorical leper colonies. I know because I'm an eye surgeon who used to work in Africa, and I've been involved in outreach trips to operate on cataracts in leper colonies. If we hadn't arranged the trips, the people would have had no chance of getting their sight back. Nobody much cares about them.
Find another bloody metaphor.
To clarify, the non-fact-checker I'm dissing is Janis Ian, not cervesaebraciator, whose comments are highly sensible (I reckon) and who has made a good catch in finding the Janis Ian quote. Evidently a fact-checker.
Anybody who thinks James Joyce was antisemitic plainly hasn't done the research - in particular, hasn't read Ulysses. Or even seen a synopsis of the plot ...
... but then only people who think that Art can play the role of morality or religion should be surprised.
General point is right, though. Which proves that even people who don't bother checking facts get it right sometimes.
Not difficult to construct a list of horrible people who made great novels, great poetry, great art
C is "secure" now? ...
Surprise, surprise indeed
Yup.
...
I'm the son of a teenage mother and I'm doing just fine, thanks.
As far as is consistent with being someone who posts on Slashdot, that is
I was scrolling down to see if anyone had beaten me to Alexei Panshin. Drat.
"Rite of Passage" is one of the great science fiction novels. There isn't anything very groundbreaking from the science angle but the characterisation and plot are brilliant.
My teenage daughter assumed that Panshin must be female because his teenage girl protagonist is so believable. Her gradual (partial) transcending of her own cultural blindness is excellently done, and the way Panshin manages to use her as a highly sympathetic POV character from what turns out to be a really quite disturbing culture is done with a lot of subtlety.
Yes indeed:
http://xkcd.com/908/
The population of Japan frequently rioted against the oppressive ruling class. For example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakumatsu#Economic_and_social_crisis
and many other examples throughout Japanese history.
Your teacher may have been Japanese, but they can't have known much history...
I think you're probably thinking of Thailand.
Finger Print
There is a Befunge program for chess which is 1.5KB, and plays legally at least. Proof either of the great ingenuity of the human race or of the fact that some people have way too much time on their hands.
Somebody has to say it ....
....?
I *like* Unity (even though I've been using Ubuntu since Feisty.)
Am I alone? Guys? Guys
It's a myth that doctors take the Hippocratic oath, at least in the UK. Never have done. It explicitly forbids abortion, incidentally.
No, they conquered the market by abusing their dominance of the desktop OS market to crush competition, by twisting the arm of vendors to make them ship all their computers with the MS inferior product preinstalled.
If it had really been a superior product, nobody would have been making a fuss. It wasn't.
Possibly you also believe that Windows' stranglehold on the desktop is due to the intrinsic virtues of the OS too?
Discussed here by someone who actually knows about this stuff:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1869
This has been disgracefully overhyped by all the news media that I've seen that have picked it up, often in very similar words, suggesting that the ultimate blame lies with the original press release.
The fact is that the technique hasn't even been *tried* yet on Macular Degeneration, much less been shown to actually work.
All that's been done is some studies on a quite different disease for which quite effective treatments already exist.
The history of efforts to treat Macular Degeneration is full of false hopes, and it is desperately cruel to grieving patients and relatives to put out seriously premature press releases like this. I am an eye surgeon specialising in these conditions and I had to deal with some very upset people because of this only today.
Prof Marshall is a very eminent figure in the development of laser treatments for eye disease, but if he had much to do with the way this has been presented to the media he should do some hard thinking about his responsibilities.
There's a brief press release about this on the website of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (British eye surgeons' professional organisation)
http://www.rcophth.ac.uk/about/press/
Caldera (before the turn to the dark side) in a 1 G partition on the family desktop.
...
I kept practically everything on the much bigger Win 98 partition and mounted it at boot.
Second install was an ancient incarnation of RedHat (6 I think) on an old Toshiba laptop.
Had to use framebuffer for the graphics for months before I got X to run properly.
It was great.
I've never used Windows since.
Installing modern distros is just too easy
I'm a different medical professional, and neither of them speaks for me.
HTH
You remember right about the retina being "inside out". However ...
There's actually a potential space between the photoreceptors (rods and cones)and the outermost layer of the retina, the pigment epithelium. This is the level at which the retina comes loose in retinal detachment.
The way you do this is not to get between the photoreceptors and the nerve fibre layer (which would cause total loss of vision in that part of the retina) but between the photoreceptors and the pigment epithelium, essentially by making a limited retinal detachment on purpose.
This is major league eye surgery (very much more so than a cataract operation, for example) which could only be carried out by a highly trained subspecialist in retinal surgery (this is one of the ways in which the publicity handout from Moorfields is pretty misleading).
If this technique proves valuable when it finally gets trialled (and that's by no means inevitable - there have been a great many false hopes over the years in treating this miserable disease) actually getting the treatment for everbody who needs it will be a huge logistical problem. This is a disease which eventually affects every third person in Western countries.