Right, this is where the anti-global warming lobbyists lose me.
There's a lot of profit for big companies if they don't have to cut emissions. I can easily see why they would lie and use every tactic possible to keep making money. Corporations have resorted to dishonesty time and again to turn a profit.
What is the corresponding motivation for pro-global warming scientists? Why would scientists be lying about global warming? What's their incentive to be dishonest and "make up data" and etc.?
Without any compelling motivation to lie, I tend to feel the scientists get the benefit of the doubt over the corporate lobbyists.
also tend to flash-mob for "stimulus plans" and the like. And we know how well those expenditures of our money have gone
You mean that Bush and Obama's stimulus spendings have gone well, right? That they've helped prevent the economy from further circling the drain by preventing the loss of many jobs, which has prevented the foreclosure of many homes, which has prevented worse decreases in consumer spending, etc.?
I'm also not sure what "flash mobs for stimulus plans" you're talking about. As far as I know, both governments (conservative and liberal) and their economists (including Bush's fed reserve chairman, Ben Burnanke) think this is the best economic policy during a depression. I'm much more inclined to listen to, ya know, economists than listen to a bunch of hate-filled partisan extremists.
The only cheerleading I've seen is the "tea parties" that were planned (and executed) before the Democrats even entered office. Which make absolutely no sense in light of the excessive spending during 8 years of conservative rule. Which included stimulus spending both before AND after we entered a massive recession.
Who exactly are the tea parties cheerleading for? 8 more years of recession? Is there even a pretense of solutions coming from these extremists? Are they happy enough slamming anyone and everyone, conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, as long as it whips up a loyalist fervor on the extremist talk shows?
The answer to all of this is social networks. Whether it's posting pictures+blogs+"tweets" on Facebook that are only shared with your friends, or using Android's geolocation and only sharing it with your contact list.
What we really need is a social network that isn't closed up in a single company's app. I'd love to use my Facebook social network for sharing pictures and "private" blog entries about vacations. The problem is that it requires uploading all my data where it's locked up in Facebook.
Maybe in a few years we'll have an open cross-application social network. Anyone know of any platform like this out there now? Google Wave is the closest thing I can think of.
Media-ownership caps so that a small handful of corporations aren't controlling broadcast news?
Kind of like how if we had limited the size of big banks (and their insurers), we might have been able to let capitalism run its course instead of Bush and Obama having to bail them out for being "too big"?
Public broadcasting is scary? Do PBS, NPR, and the BBC make you quake in your boots? Seriously?
Minority ownership sounds like racism, maybe thats the one you think is scary?
That's an odd example. It says they DID refer the case to state authorities, so it's not exactly "I'll take my ball away". There's gotta be something more there to explain why state authorities would charge for it but the federal agents wouldn't?
Maybe something as simple as "if they only committed 1 crime in a 1 state, it would be out of federal jurisdiction and they would be unable to proceed with the case anyway"?
The odds of dying from it if you catch it are not much higher than seasonal flu---less than a factor of two or so in the U.S., IIRC, which is bad, but not "kills a third of the population" bad or anything.
However, the odds of catching it are close to 100%. Compared to what percentage with regular influenza? 5%? If we had 1 death per 100 people with influenza at that rate, we'd have 10 deaths per 100 people with swine flu (if it's half as severe).
It isn't the end of the world, but it's certainly more serious than regular influenza and worth having a vaccine for.
Virulence is as important to consider as severity. This is so contagious (due to lack of immunity) that almost everyone will get it.
The deaths per capita will be far higher than influenza, even if the individual risk of death is lower. We're quite fortunate it's mild enough that many people who have gotten it don't even realize it.
While you and parent+GP+GGP make sense, there would still be loopholes where the original company would process the charges on behalf of the "rewards" company.
On the plus side, this is more effort and bad press for the legitimate company, compared to passing you to an advertising page and letting someone else do the dirty work.
Thanks for the link. The key problem with that page, to me, is that the Yes button specifically is surrounded with misleading text.
It says "YES, I want discounts and $10".
not "YES, I want to sign up for the reservation rewards service"
Along with (previous to changes) repeatedly referring to it as a "reward" instead of as a for-pay service.
The rest is a pile of small text meant to overwhelm the customer who isn't the least bit interested in reading a book about a service they've never heard of. They're looking for the "ignore and continue" button. If it says "Continue and get $10 free", then yeah, most people will click that button.
I've never made the mistake myself, but most people aren't as cynical and careful as slashdotters are.
In Perl you have a lot more control over what libraries you pull in and how you use them
The flip side is that you have to pull things in to use them, and you often have several 3rd party modules with separate versioning from the core language. This is added complexity that CAN carry some benefits, but as with any complexity, carries a lot of headaches too.
I've seen code deployed on a system with the same Perl version as the test system. A CPAN module for some ridiculously basic thing was on a different version on the production system, and had completely changed the functions and parameters in the update.
Although having more built-in adds complexity in other ways - like adding security vulnerabilities in features your application may not even use.
How do you think it's more useful than the Wii controllers? Eyetoy was a cute game but it doesn't seem anywhere near as useful to capture movement using a single camera (ie: no 3d movement) as using a controller. I'm sure at some point the two will be combined for some interesting effects, but the camera alone is very limiting.
Yep, that's pretty much right. The best gauge in these types of things is a company's past and behavior, and Google has never done anything to make me think they're going to randomly e-mail my porn search history to my boss or wife, or whatever it is people are so scared of.
Companies everywhere have as much or more data about you than Google, and are less trustworthy. I can only guess that the OMGGOOGLEHASMAHDATA campaign is some sort of astroturf effort by a competitor.
And I guess they have mod points too cause you got modded Troll for outing slashdot paranoia.:)
Agreed, I was only addressing the "GIVE ME MONEY OBAMA" part and his implication that the bailout was a silly idea.
Your suggestion to replace the upper tiers of management sound good, but could be tough to follow through on. Without holding specific individuals accountable for poor decisions, you may cripple these institutions by firing everyone with the knowledge and competence to run them.
Of course it's debatable if any of them were competent enough to run them after what happened.
I think you missed the part where the Bush administration started the stimulus spending, and Bush-appointed fed chairman is running the show. This isn't about the left or the right, Obama or Cheney. The people bailing these companies out do not want to, but they have no real choice. If you'd listen, you'd hear that every time they talk. They hate it every bit as much as us.
The real problem is that companies are allowed to get this big.
There will be (and in fact may already be released) DSi-only games, which pisses off the DS Lite owners to no end, because they are now faced with being unable to play all new games for the thinnest of reasons.
Eh. I've got a DS-Lite from a few years back. Buying a new console that is faster and has new features for $100 every 2-4 years is not a big deal. I'm struggling to muster up any rage about this.
Of course the flip-side is that your off-the-shelf software also has off-the-shelf exploits, sometimes in functionality you don't use or even know existed. That's more a reason to upgrade such software frequently though, than reason to avoid it entirely.
I'm mildly worried about the swine flu with the wife+baby (not so much myself). Interestingly, we both had a VERY contagious "cold" a couple months back. Very odd since it was summer, and I couldn't identify any particular vector other than "I went outside".
I had a headache and weakness, but fever never went above 101 or so. My wife got it as well (so ~6 months pregnant at the time) but it barely hit her at all - no fever, no headache, no weakness.
When my wife started getting it we went to the doctor. He made two interesting statements to sum it up: 1: "Unless you have a fever over 104 there's nothing to worry about." 2: "Unless you have a fever over 104, it's not the flu."
The first is useful to know, as it gives a decent gauge by which to know whether it's time to worry.
RE: The second - when I got home I googled "swine flu without fever" (or similar) and found an article from the NY Times from months back stating that 1/3rd of patients with swine flu did not have a fever over 104. Doh. So still hoping we already got it, as half of my work is out sick with the flu right now...
The risks of complications from a vaccine are generally small, but non-zero.
The risks of complications from swine flu are also non-zero, and significantly higher than any measure of vaccination risks I've seen.
That doesn't give you the right to demand others undertake a medical procedure.
You're (intentionally?) misrepresenting the "demand" here.
There's no "You HAVE to get vaccinated!".
It's "You HAVE to get vaccinated...to remain employed here at the hospital where you're presenting a significant risk to our patients (and pocketbooks, in case of lawsuit)".
You have no guarantee of employment, and requiring vaccinations is certainly one of the more innocent things that have been required of people to keep their jobs.
IANAB but a counter-point is that e-coli is asexual, and thus can only evolve from mitosis and random changes.
Humans and other sexual organisms can go through speciation much more quickly because of meiosis and the way it copies and mixes genes with a relatively low error rate and relatively meaningful recombination.
For a bad analogy, mitosis is copying down a sentence over and over, each time randomly changing a letter to some other letter (or a space or punctuation). Most of the changes to your sentence are going to make it meaningless.
Meisos is more like taking a paragraph and rearranging the words (genes), and sometimes copying words to other sentences entirely. It's a much safer and effective means of evolving.
It'd be neat to see them do this kind of long-lived experiment with a sexual organism, perhaps with some specific (and bizarre) selection pressure to see what the organism can come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, this is where the anti-global warming lobbyists lose me.
There's a lot of profit for big companies if they don't have to cut emissions. I can easily see why they would lie and use every tactic possible to keep making money. Corporations have resorted to dishonesty time and again to turn a profit.
What is the corresponding motivation for pro-global warming scientists? Why would scientists be lying about global warming? What's their incentive to be dishonest and "make up data" and etc.?
Without any compelling motivation to lie, I tend to feel the scientists get the benefit of the doubt over the corporate lobbyists.
also tend to flash-mob for "stimulus plans" and the like. And we know how well those expenditures of our money have gone
You mean that Bush and Obama's stimulus spendings have gone well, right? That they've helped prevent the economy from further circling the drain by preventing the loss of many jobs, which has prevented the foreclosure of many homes, which has prevented worse decreases in consumer spending, etc.?
I'm also not sure what "flash mobs for stimulus plans" you're talking about. As far as I know, both governments (conservative and liberal) and their economists (including Bush's fed reserve chairman, Ben Burnanke) think this is the best economic policy during a depression. I'm much more inclined to listen to, ya know, economists than listen to a bunch of hate-filled partisan extremists.
The only cheerleading I've seen is the "tea parties" that were planned (and executed) before the Democrats even entered office. Which make absolutely no sense in light of the excessive spending during 8 years of conservative rule. Which included stimulus spending both before AND after we entered a massive recession.
Who exactly are the tea parties cheerleading for? 8 more years of recession? Is there even a pretense of solutions coming from these extremists? Are they happy enough slamming anyone and everyone, conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, as long as it whips up a loyalist fervor on the extremist talk shows?
The answer to all of this is social networks. Whether it's posting pictures+blogs+"tweets" on Facebook that are only shared with your friends, or using Android's geolocation and only sharing it with your contact list.
What we really need is a social network that isn't closed up in a single company's app. I'd love to use my Facebook social network for sharing pictures and "private" blog entries about vacations. The problem is that it requires uploading all my data where it's locked up in Facebook.
Maybe in a few years we'll have an open cross-application social network. Anyone know of any platform like this out there now? Google Wave is the closest thing I can think of.
Is network neutrality supposed to be scary?
Media-ownership caps so that a small handful of corporations aren't controlling broadcast news?
Kind of like how if we had limited the size of big banks (and their insurers), we might have been able to let capitalism run its course instead of Bush and Obama having to bail them out for being "too big"?
Public broadcasting is scary? Do PBS, NPR, and the BBC make you quake in your boots? Seriously?
Minority ownership sounds like racism, maybe thats the one you think is scary?
What's scary here? Were you being sarcastic?
That's an odd example. It says they DID refer the case to state authorities, so it's not exactly "I'll take my ball away". There's gotta be something more there to explain why state authorities would charge for it but the federal agents wouldn't?
Maybe something as simple as "if they only committed 1 crime in a 1 state, it would be out of federal jurisdiction and they would be unable to proceed with the case anyway"?
The odds of dying from it if you catch it are not much higher than seasonal flu---less than a factor of two or so in the U.S., IIRC, which is bad, but not "kills a third of the population" bad or anything.
However, the odds of catching it are close to 100%. Compared to what percentage with regular influenza? 5%? If we had 1 death per 100 people with influenza at that rate, we'd have 10 deaths per 100 people with swine flu (if it's half as severe).
It isn't the end of the world, but it's certainly more serious than regular influenza and worth having a vaccine for.
Virulence is as important to consider as severity. This is so contagious (due to lack of immunity) that almost everyone will get it.
The deaths per capita will be far higher than influenza, even if the individual risk of death is lower. We're quite fortunate it's mild enough that many people who have gotten it don't even realize it.
Turning a single comment into a thread (by responding to it) draws attention to the comment, making it more likely to get modded up.
It's still a fairly rude waste of space if the comment consists of nothing more than "mod parent up".
While you and parent+GP+GGP make sense, there would still be loopholes where the original company would process the charges on behalf of the "rewards" company.
On the plus side, this is more effort and bad press for the legitimate company, compared to passing you to an advertising page and letting someone else do the dirty work.
Thanks for the link. The key problem with that page, to me, is that the Yes button specifically is surrounded with misleading text.
It says "YES, I want discounts and $10".
not "YES, I want to sign up for the reservation rewards service"
Along with (previous to changes) repeatedly referring to it as a "reward" instead of as a for-pay service.
The rest is a pile of small text meant to overwhelm the customer who isn't the least bit interested in reading a book about a service they've never heard of. They're looking for the "ignore and continue" button. If it says "Continue and get $10 free", then yeah, most people will click that button.
I've never made the mistake myself, but most people aren't as cynical and careful as slashdotters are.
More games need to enforce maximum rates of fire and the like.
Are there games that don't? I thought all games by this point let you hold down the trigger for "turbo" fire at the maximum speed.
In Perl you have a lot more control over what libraries you pull in and how you use them
The flip side is that you have to pull things in to use them, and you often have several 3rd party modules with separate versioning from the core language. This is added complexity that CAN carry some benefits, but as with any complexity, carries a lot of headaches too.
I've seen code deployed on a system with the same Perl version as the test system. A CPAN module for some ridiculously basic thing was on a different version on the production system, and had completely changed the functions and parameters in the update.
Although having more built-in adds complexity in other ways - like adding security vulnerabilities in features your application may not even use.
How do you think it's more useful than the Wii controllers? Eyetoy was a cute game but it doesn't seem anywhere near as useful to capture movement using a single camera (ie: no 3d movement) as using a controller. I'm sure at some point the two will be combined for some interesting effects, but the camera alone is very limiting.
Agreed. I can only hope they fixed some of the worst command line behaviors in Windows 7, maybe that could become usable too...
Yep, that's pretty much right. The best gauge in these types of things is a company's past and behavior, and Google has never done anything to make me think they're going to randomly e-mail my porn search history to my boss or wife, or whatever it is people are so scared of.
Companies everywhere have as much or more data about you than Google, and are less trustworthy. I can only guess that the OMGGOOGLEHASMAHDATA campaign is some sort of astroturf effort by a competitor.
And I guess they have mod points too cause you got modded Troll for outing slashdot paranoia. :)
Agreed, I was only addressing the "GIVE ME MONEY OBAMA" part and his implication that the bailout was a silly idea.
Your suggestion to replace the upper tiers of management sound good, but could be tough to follow through on. Without holding specific individuals accountable for poor decisions, you may cripple these institutions by firing everyone with the knowledge and competence to run them.
Of course it's debatable if any of them were competent enough to run them after what happened.
I think you missed the part where the Bush administration started the stimulus spending, and Bush-appointed fed chairman is running the show. This isn't about the left or the right, Obama or Cheney. The people bailing these companies out do not want to, but they have no real choice. If you'd listen, you'd hear that every time they talk. They hate it every bit as much as us.
The real problem is that companies are allowed to get this big.
There will be (and in fact may already be released) DSi-only games, which pisses off the DS Lite owners to no end, because they are now faced with being unable to play all new games for the thinnest of reasons.
Eh. I've got a DS-Lite from a few years back. Buying a new console that is faster and has new features for $100 every 2-4 years is not a big deal. I'm struggling to muster up any rage about this.
Check out Mac Buyer's Guide, it's excellent at tracking when the last time a given product was upgraded, and when it is likely to be upgraded again.
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Of course the flip-side is that your off-the-shelf software also has off-the-shelf exploits, sometimes in functionality you don't use or even know existed. That's more a reason to upgrade such software frequently though, than reason to avoid it entirely.
Same here, but early november.
I'm mildly worried about the swine flu with the wife+baby (not so much myself). Interestingly, we both had a VERY contagious "cold" a couple months back. Very odd since it was summer, and I couldn't identify any particular vector other than "I went outside".
I had a headache and weakness, but fever never went above 101 or so. My wife got it as well (so ~6 months pregnant at the time) but it barely hit her at all - no fever, no headache, no weakness.
When my wife started getting it we went to the doctor. He made two interesting statements to sum it up:
1: "Unless you have a fever over 104 there's nothing to worry about."
2: "Unless you have a fever over 104, it's not the flu."
The first is useful to know, as it gives a decent gauge by which to know whether it's time to worry.
RE: The second - when I got home I googled "swine flu without fever" (or similar) and found an article from the NY Times from months back stating that 1/3rd of patients with swine flu did not have a fever over 104. Doh. So still hoping we already got it, as half of my work is out sick with the flu right now...
The risks of complications from a vaccine are generally small, but non-zero.
The risks of complications from swine flu are also non-zero, and significantly higher than any measure of vaccination risks I've seen.
That doesn't give you the right to demand others undertake a medical procedure.
You're (intentionally?) misrepresenting the "demand" here.
There's no "You HAVE to get vaccinated!".
It's "You HAVE to get vaccinated...to remain employed here at the hospital where you're presenting a significant risk to our patients (and pocketbooks, in case of lawsuit)".
You have no guarantee of employment, and requiring vaccinations is certainly one of the more innocent things that have been required of people to keep their jobs.
Great post and references, wish I had mod points.
IANAB but a counter-point is that e-coli is asexual, and thus can only evolve from mitosis and random changes.
Humans and other sexual organisms can go through speciation much more quickly because of meiosis and the way it copies and mixes genes with a relatively low error rate and relatively meaningful recombination.
For a bad analogy, mitosis is copying down a sentence over and over, each time randomly changing a letter to some other letter (or a space or punctuation). Most of the changes to your sentence are going to make it meaningless.
Meisos is more like taking a paragraph and rearranging the words (genes), and sometimes copying words to other sentences entirely. It's a much safer and effective means of evolving.
It'd be neat to see them do this kind of long-lived experiment with a sexual organism, perhaps with some specific (and bizarre) selection pressure to see what the organism can come up with.