I know I'm posting waaay late here, but I wanted to point out that just because the data isn't statistically signficant now doesn't mean it won't be later. If I flip a coin 365 times and get heads 51% of the time, it may well be a fair coin, but if I continue flipping that coin and 3650 trials later I'm still at 51%, that 1% edge for heads may well have become statistically significant- same goes with a slight warming trend should it last long enough.
You have it the wrong way around. Wakefield's study was basically "MMR vaccine causes autism, get the individual ones instead". He NEVER suggested vaccines in general are bad, just the MMR vaccine specifically (the story goes that he was working with a manufacturer of the individual vaccines). It was the anti-vax idiots like McCarthy who took the Wakefield study and blew it into "vaccines are bad", ultimately killing children in the process. Wakefield was unethical but I wouldn't say he has blood on his hands.
No, those deaths fall squarely on the shoulders of the anti-vax crowd. Wakefield just wanted to scare people away from the MMR vaccine in favor of separate vaccines (which his... benefactor was trying to push).
potential mass destruction of staple food crops due to pesticide resistance
[...]
or in any way supports this concept of patented genes in the crop cycle
I think it's important to point out that a crop monoculture that encourages overuse of pesticides and patenting crops are two independent issues. The former is a serious problem, the latter is just a complicated legal issue.
Personally, I think the law should equate the issue of patented plants contaminating "natural" plants as being like a music label uploading songs on TBP- it was an authorized source (in this case, a liscensed Monsanto plant) that made the copy and distributed it, making the copy legal (although unlike a song on TPB, the new seed comes with a liscense to copy it further). Most people don't dispute the artist's or label's right to copyright a song, the concerns are over their enforcement practices, the same should apply for plant patents. That said, I would agree that no plant patents is likely better than the current, unworkable enforcement we are seeing.
I think proper wording would be "there are no good cops in a police department until there are no bad cops". While a cop in LA has no influence over what kind of cops work in New York, cops within a department are responsible for one another.
If someone beats another man half to death and leaves him on the street, it doesn't reflect upon me if I'm unaware of the situation, but it certainly reflects poorly upon me if I do nothing despite being a witness, or even if I just come upon the victim later and do nothing to help. Along the same lines, so long as a bad cop's behavior is (or should be) known by other cops in the department, those other cops aren't really good cops if they do nothing about it.
I mentioned colony collapse both due to various mainstream news articles mentioning it, and because when looking to find links to the papers the first thing I came across was another article from the same issue, mentioning colony collapse and talking about these papers. I do not have access to Science so I cannot see the full text, but I assumed the newspapers were drawing from this guy's report. The summary provided does not explicitly connect these studies to CCD, so it would be helpful if someone with access could let us know if the newspapers were overdoing the CCD angle.
That said, if these pesticides are widely used, and they do cause navigation problems for bees, it would make sense that they would be at least aggrevating the CCD problem, if not a root cause.
As soon as I hit "submit", I realized that yes vaccines do reduce your exposure in the sense that the pathogen vaccinated against may cease to exist in your environment. Of course, whether or not an individual gets vaccinated doesn't affect their environmental exposure, so administering a vaccine couldn't be a trigger in of itself (at least as far as the germ exposure theory goes). That said, if herd immunity really was a factor in the prevalence of autism, it would mean we just have to find a way to minimize the autism side-effect.
That said, if modern medicine is a factor in autism, I don't think vaccines are the culprit. This study doesn't seem to single out any single pathogen, so there is no reason to believe that eliminating certain ones would be an issue.
Vaccines don't affect your exposure to germs (if anything, they increase your exposure)- their purpose is to modify your body's response when you are exposed. Disinfectants and antibiotics would certainly affect exposure to germs, though.
I certainly would like to see BluRay meet the conveneince of the pirated version, but there's no need to exaggerate. I have a PS3 at home for BluRay - updates aren't that frequent (unlike your suggestion that it needs to update every time you watch a movie), and Windows updates are more frequent (given that's where most would watch their pirated copy), so no argument there. I agree BluRay can be excessive with the unskippable screens and previews, but that's up to the studio. I have the Bourne and Star Wars series, I don't recall sitting through previews to watch them... I can't tell you the time between putting the disc in and starting the movie though. YMMV with other BluRay players.
One, it is a notable weather trend for the area, whetever the implications for it (i.e. it is newsworthy in of itself). Second, global warming may well be an aggravating factor in both the Midwest's heat and Europe's cold - as warming may impact various phenomena it will be interesting to see how much change we see in climate trends, both in changes to typical weather and variability.
Then again, this might just be a fluke and have nothing to do with global warming, we just will have to see.
This past winter's average temperature was 32.8 degrees, 6.4 degrees above the current winter average of 26.4. It is unusual for a Chicago winter to average above freezing, occurring in just 13 of 142 Chicago winters dating to 1870-71, less than 10 percent of the time.
Adding to that trend of warm temperatures, the average temperature this March through the 18th was 50.4, over a typical average of 34.3, and well exceeding the previous record of 47.5. As the records have continued, we may well set a record for most consecutive record highs, in addition to hitting 85 sooner than ever recorded, and getting more days in the 80s in March than has ever been recorded in April.
(I live in the Chicago area, and have for 16 years)
We already barely had a winter- there were plenty of days in the 40s and 50s, temperatures never dipped below 0, and then to end it we get weeks of 60s and then 80s, when normally we would be getting highs in the 40s right now. If it was just a heat wave out of nowhere, I would agree with you, but unusual warmth has been the trend for months (while until now we hadn't been setting day-to-day temperature records, we have consistently been well above average). While nominally the explanation is the Arctic Oscillation plus La Nina, this "winter" does seem unprecedented (I have to wonder how much global warming is affecting the strength of these effects).
If you want more information about records set, you can poke around here. We have been setting a variety of records related to continued high temperatures.
My point is, so long as we have MAD levels of nukes sitting back home, the missile shield in Europe has no bearing on the US being able to "win" a nuclear war. I should have said "entire nuclear stockpile" just to be clear.
What? These missiles are in Europe, there is nothing stopping the US from installing as many missile defense systems as it wants within its own borders. Unless you are suggesting that the US keeps its nuclear stockpile in Europe, these missiles have no bearing on MAD.
Yes, it would be plausible that missiles based in Europe would do a better job at shooting down ICBMs as they launch rather than when over the US, but given there is a lot of Russia very very far from Europe, that doesn't mean a lot. The only use of putting a missile shield in Europe is to (surprise!) defend Europe. Russia just wants something to complain about (and therefore keep relations on the brink already, preventing us from pushing them too hard on other issues) so they pick the easiest target.
I expect the US government has some sort of ulterior motive in this (so I would be interested to hear theories), but breaking MAD doesn't seem to be it.
To be fair, the birdsong example isn't a problem with this six strike approach, as the company that flagged it did correct the issue (and even posted comments to the slashdot story). As you get several warnings that have no real repercussion, that would give you a chance to refute false positives.
That said, I have no reason to believe that this proposed rule will give you a proper means to refute strikes against you.
The problem is that supersonic flight requires too damned much fuel for too little gain
Of course, at altitude the speed of sound is slower, further aggravating the problem of trying not to inch too close to the sound barrier. Although faster subsonic flight could be achieved simply by flying in lower, denser air, obviously the best solution is to take advantage of the speed of sound being many times faster through water and make submersible airplanes. By flying planes through the water, we could save time even going only half the speed of sound, which clearly means we would save fuel too. It also has the added benefit of eliminating air pollution.
It goes without saying, but after getting this technology to market, we will have to develop planes that fly through the ground, taking advantage of the much higher speed of sound in solids.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Netflix know about the DNS problem? If it's a widespread issue I'm sure Netflix or the FTC would be interested.
I know I'm posting waaay late here, but I wanted to point out that just because the data isn't statistically signficant now doesn't mean it won't be later. If I flip a coin 365 times and get heads 51% of the time, it may well be a fair coin, but if I continue flipping that coin and 3650 trials later I'm still at 51%, that 1% edge for heads may well have become statistically significant- same goes with a slight warming trend should it last long enough.
You have it the wrong way around. Wakefield's study was basically "MMR vaccine causes autism, get the individual ones instead". He NEVER suggested vaccines in general are bad, just the MMR vaccine specifically (the story goes that he was working with a manufacturer of the individual vaccines). It was the anti-vax idiots like McCarthy who took the Wakefield study and blew it into "vaccines are bad", ultimately killing children in the process. Wakefield was unethical but I wouldn't say he has blood on his hands.
No, those deaths fall squarely on the shoulders of the anti-vax crowd. Wakefield just wanted to scare people away from the MMR vaccine in favor of separate vaccines (which his... benefactor was trying to push).
Ghunter2d
Given insects by definition have 6 legs, all we have to do is make GM bees with 7 legs, and the insecticide problem will surely go away.
potential mass destruction of staple food crops due to pesticide resistance
[...]
or in any way supports this concept of patented genes in the crop cycle
I think it's important to point out that a crop monoculture that encourages overuse of pesticides and patenting crops are two independent issues. The former is a serious problem, the latter is just a complicated legal issue.
Personally, I think the law should equate the issue of patented plants contaminating "natural" plants as being like a music label uploading songs on TBP- it was an authorized source (in this case, a liscensed Monsanto plant) that made the copy and distributed it, making the copy legal (although unlike a song on TPB, the new seed comes with a liscense to copy it further). Most people don't dispute the artist's or label's right to copyright a song, the concerns are over their enforcement practices, the same should apply for plant patents. That said, I would agree that no plant patents is likely better than the current, unworkable enforcement we are seeing.
I think proper wording would be "there are no good cops in a police department until there are no bad cops". While a cop in LA has no influence over what kind of cops work in New York, cops within a department are responsible for one another.
If someone beats another man half to death and leaves him on the street, it doesn't reflect upon me if I'm unaware of the situation, but it certainly reflects poorly upon me if I do nothing despite being a witness, or even if I just come upon the victim later and do nothing to help. Along the same lines, so long as a bad cop's behavior is (or should be) known by other cops in the department, those other cops aren't really good cops if they do nothing about it.
So because Amazon already has a (fair) advantage, they should get an unfair advantage on top of that?
So it's always the ones complaining that are doing so in bad faith, never the accused?
I mentioned colony collapse both due to various mainstream news articles mentioning it, and because when looking to find links to the papers the first thing I came across was another article from the same issue, mentioning colony collapse and talking about these papers. I do not have access to Science so I cannot see the full text, but I assumed the newspapers were drawing from this guy's report. The summary provided does not explicitly connect these studies to CCD, so it would be helpful if someone with access could let us know if the newspapers were overdoing the CCD angle.
That said, if these pesticides are widely used, and they do cause navigation problems for bees, it would make sense that they would be at least aggrevating the CCD problem, if not a root cause.
You have no argument, so you resort to ad hominem. What does that say about your understanding of your position?
That was sounding a lot like an ad hominem itself, close one.
As soon as I hit "submit", I realized that yes vaccines do reduce your exposure in the sense that the pathogen vaccinated against may cease to exist in your environment. Of course, whether or not an individual gets vaccinated doesn't affect their environmental exposure, so administering a vaccine couldn't be a trigger in of itself (at least as far as the germ exposure theory goes). That said, if herd immunity really was a factor in the prevalence of autism, it would mean we just have to find a way to minimize the autism side-effect.
That said, if modern medicine is a factor in autism, I don't think vaccines are the culprit. This study doesn't seem to single out any single pathogen, so there is no reason to believe that eliminating certain ones would be an issue.
Vaccines don't affect your exposure to germs (if anything, they increase your exposure)- their purpose is to modify your body's response when you are exposed. Disinfectants and antibiotics would certainly affect exposure to germs, though.
I certainly would like to see BluRay meet the conveneince of the pirated version, but there's no need to exaggerate. I have a PS3 at home for BluRay - updates aren't that frequent (unlike your suggestion that it needs to update every time you watch a movie), and Windows updates are more frequent (given that's where most would watch their pirated copy), so no argument there. I agree BluRay can be excessive with the unskippable screens and previews, but that's up to the studio. I have the Bourne and Star Wars series, I don't recall sitting through previews to watch them... I can't tell you the time between putting the disc in and starting the movie though. YMMV with other BluRay players.
Along those lines, I'm curious how much impact there was on operating costs due to Yucca Mountain being cancelled.
One, it is a notable weather trend for the area, whetever the implications for it (i.e. it is newsworthy in of itself). Second, global warming may well be an aggravating factor in both the Midwest's heat and Europe's cold - as warming may impact various phenomena it will be interesting to see how much change we see in climate trends, both in changes to typical weather and variability.
Then again, this might just be a fluke and have nothing to do with global warming, we just will have to see.
This past winter's average temperature was 32.8 degrees, 6.4 degrees above the current winter average of 26.4. It is unusual for a Chicago winter to average above freezing, occurring in just 13 of 142 Chicago winters dating to 1870-71, less than 10 percent of the time.
Adding to that trend of warm temperatures, the average temperature this March through the 18th was 50.4, over a typical average of 34.3, and well exceeding the previous record of 47.5. As the records have continued, we may well set a record for most consecutive record highs, in addition to hitting 85 sooner than ever recorded, and getting more days in the 80s in March than has ever been recorded in April.
Source.
(I live in the Chicago area, and have for 16 years)
We already barely had a winter- there were plenty of days in the 40s and 50s, temperatures never dipped below 0, and then to end it we get weeks of 60s and then 80s, when normally we would be getting highs in the 40s right now. If it was just a heat wave out of nowhere, I would agree with you, but unusual warmth has been the trend for months (while until now we hadn't been setting day-to-day temperature records, we have consistently been well above average). While nominally the explanation is the Arctic Oscillation plus La Nina, this "winter" does seem unprecedented (I have to wonder how much global warming is affecting the strength of these effects).
If you want more information about records set, you can poke around here. We have been setting a variety of records related to continued high temperatures.
My point is, so long as we have MAD levels of nukes sitting back home, the missile shield in Europe has no bearing on the US being able to "win" a nuclear war. I should have said "entire nuclear stockpile" just to be clear.
What? These missiles are in Europe, there is nothing stopping the US from installing as many missile defense systems as it wants within its own borders. Unless you are suggesting that the US keeps its nuclear stockpile in Europe, these missiles have no bearing on MAD.
Yes, it would be plausible that missiles based in Europe would do a better job at shooting down ICBMs as they launch rather than when over the US, but given there is a lot of Russia very very far from Europe, that doesn't mean a lot. The only use of putting a missile shield in Europe is to (surprise!) defend Europe. Russia just wants something to complain about (and therefore keep relations on the brink already, preventing us from pushing them too hard on other issues) so they pick the easiest target.
I expect the US government has some sort of ulterior motive in this (so I would be interested to hear theories), but breaking MAD doesn't seem to be it.
Unless the summary was updated since you posted, it does refer to RWA in past tense ("the act was slated..."). Not sure what the issue is.
To be fair, the birdsong example isn't a problem with this six strike approach, as the company that flagged it did correct the issue (and even posted comments to the slashdot story). As you get several warnings that have no real repercussion, that would give you a chance to refute false positives.
That said, I have no reason to believe that this proposed rule will give you a proper means to refute strikes against you.
The problem is that supersonic flight requires too damned much fuel for too little gain
Of course, at altitude the speed of sound is slower, further aggravating the problem of trying not to inch too close to the sound barrier. Although faster subsonic flight could be achieved simply by flying in lower, denser air, obviously the best solution is to take advantage of the speed of sound being many times faster through water and make submersible airplanes. By flying planes through the water, we could save time even going only half the speed of sound, which clearly means we would save fuel too. It also has the added benefit of eliminating air pollution.
It goes without saying, but after getting this technology to market, we will have to develop planes that fly through the ground, taking advantage of the much higher speed of sound in solids.
Don't forget all the things you drove to the store for- you already paid taxes on the gas.