I don't know where you got the idea that this is supposed to be a cure-all, it's not. There's some promising research on few specific autoimmune disorders - mostly on Crohn's disease - and a lot more ongoing on this, the theory is pretty sound, not quackery (though it's probably too early to tell if it turns out to work, so the same can't necessarily be said for the peddlers).
The helminths used are hookworms and whipworms. As you say, hookworms can cause anemia, and I think the same is true for trichuris as well, but that's because in "natural" infestations there are often thousands of them. AFAIK, it's been pretty well established in parasitology long before anyone thought they might have any benefit that infections with small number of worms are almost always asymptomatic. The species used aren't capable of causing autoinfection either so the load stays constant. It does appear reasonably safe - and the drugs for getting rid of the darn things are well known and very effective if someone does go wrong.
There are quite a few opportunistic pathogens that are non-specialized, eg. soil bacteria that are normally free-living but if you're exposed with a weakened immune system or manage to get them into a wound, you may be in trouble. I imagine some space bugs might be dangerous in similar way, but indeed, spreading like wildfire from people to people is a mere fantasy - unless it's genetically engineered by the Evil Aliens(TM), of course.
Really? How about the Great Tenochtitlan which was a city before Paris was anything but a mound of mud?
Is that so? Funny, considering Paris already had a population of tens of thousands over a thousand years before Tenochtitlan was anything but a mount of mud, and had 250000 people around the time Aztecs started building their city in 1300's.
Here is a map of Paris a hundred years before Tenochtitlan was established. Feel free to hang it on the wall for your viewing pleasure.
How probable is it that a planet has an ozone layer in somewhat upper atmosphere?
How is this relevant? Earth did not have ozone layer before it had life. Life made the ozone layer possible (by pumping the atmosphere full of oxygen), not the other way around.
How probable is it that the one liquid available in enormous quantity is extremely weird, compared to many other liquids
Very probable, considering the said liquid, no matter "weird" it is, is the most common molecule in the freaking universe.
The difference is that in RH system that functionality is all in rpm and yum and you can find it by reading the manpages for them, it may be just as doable in Debian, but it's scattered into half a dozen separate utilities (like debsums) you just have to Know about, and many of them are not in the base system.
But 1. Facebook only has an either/or black/white switch, with only two groups (friends and non-friends) and only two settings (can always see, and can never see).
Entirely, and totally wrong. You can control every single thing you post down to an individual person, or lists of people that you maintain.
2) is true, of course, but it's not a Facebook specific issue, it's a problem with every centralized service.
From my perspective as an outsider who does catch a fair bit of America-centric media, the problem the US is having isn't that its citizenry doesn't care. It's that there are several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed, not uninformed.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, they depend on each other. If the rest of the population cared, few misinformed groups, no matter how loud, would not be able to wield the influence they do now that the others are apathetic.
Definitions were upgraded, though, weren't they? Just the engine was a year old...
For now. But they would not have been any longer.
That's what this is about, the definition updates grew over some size limit that triggers a bug in the older engine version, so they could either stop sending updates to them, or send an update that breaks the old engine. They chose to do the latter to avoid false sense of security, and also managed to include an error message in the update to tell people what it's about.
I would have been happy as a... clam... if the way this went down was for me to simply find my log files full of warnings this morning.
Your log files have been full of warnings for half a year. You've ignored them. You WOULD have ignored the warnings this morning too, stop kidding yourself.
I'm sorry? Life did start out oxygen- and water-free.
Here? Oxygen-free, yes. Water-free hell no. Elsewhere? Well, we'll talk about that when we find some.
Where do you think all that stuff comes from? It's processed poop. Nothing else.
Uhh, stars? Oxygen is a fusion end result, the third most abundant element in existence. I probably don't need to go into hydrogen, and the conditions for combining the two aren't exactly rare either. Water is one of the most common molecules in the universe, it's everywhere, and certainly predates any life by far. And unlike oxygen which is so reactive it tends to end up as a part of something else, water sticks around once you have it.
Because when a launch fails, it doesn't just magically disappear. It will fall somewhere. "Oh dear lord, they are launching again! Quick, everyone into your shelters!"
Launches fail, even the current ridiculously overengineered launch vehicles, and the launch sites have been selected with that in mind. When things fall, they fall in an ocean or middle of nowhere. Big deal.
I'm not a developer, but seriously, how hard can it be to allow the user to drag and drop items in the "Places" widget? The nearly identical bookmarks can be drag-and-dropped.
It's not hard at all to allow drag and drop - what is hard is being able to meaningfully remember and integrate the changes made when some device isn't there. If you drag something to the top-most location, unplug it, drag something else to top, and put the first stick back in, which should be the first? And where should the other one go?
The bookmarks are simple, because they only change when you change them.
Really? It's ok to harm someone as long as you consider their sensitivity to that harm to be rare and therefore brand them a "freak"?
So do you don a biohazard suit every time you go out? You could run into with severe immunodeficiency, and kill her just by walking by. You filthy murderer.
You might have a point if there really was a "small percentage" (implying at least several people in a hundred) with this kind of sensitivity, but there is a tipping point for everything, and at certain point of rarity it is not up to the society to adapt to the abnormal individual but the other way around. If there was one person in a million with extreme EM sensitivity, should all of humanity turn off their radiation sources? How about one in a billion? One in the entire planet?
We do not sterilize the world and walk around in hermetic suits because there are people without immune systems, we put them in isolation tents - and there were equally rare people who have problems with radiation instead of microbes, we would not stop using electricity, we would put them in faraday cages. Sucks, but life isn't fair.
The comlpaint isn't about a level of radiation that naturally originates from his neighbor's yard. It's about radiation that he alleges only comes from his neighbor's yard due to his neighbor's use of WiFi. That's pretty different from your cherry tree analogy, which is a fairly natural and expected source of pollin.
A planted cherry tree - most likely Japanese or European species alien to the Americas - is no more "natural" than a WiFi AP. They're both there because a human put them there.
As for "expected", both are that - and that's exactly the point - we can and do expect EM radiation and pollen to be everywhere, and if you can't live with that, YOU deal with it instead of the rest of the society.
That's actually one thing we can be quite sure of they *won't* dare sue anybody for, because they just lost an anti-trust lawsuit about file server interoperability in 2004
They may not dare sue anyone about Samba in Europe, but I doubt they're under any compunction about it elsewhere.
Remember Columbia? You don't need "punch" to destroy the shuttle. Hit it with ANYTHING whatsoever, and it handles "breaking everything into small pieces before landfall" all by itself.
What bugs me about the scientific world-view is, basically, for all of human history, groups of people have said "well, trust us, THIS is the shit that's got it all figured out. Just listen to this shit and you'll be A OH TAY."
And what does the science world view tell us?
Science world view tells us we don't know jack shit, and never will, but we'll keep trying to learn as much as possible.
Nobody has nothing figured out.
And scientists would be the first people in the world to proclaim just that. Many probably think their theories are close enough for government work, but no-one in science would EVER claim to have all figured out.
Makes me wonder who and what the fuck are you talking about? Because it obviously ain't science.
Not sure how representative this part is, but - when NOT driving in known area I'm always never in a real hurry.
Yes? So? All the more reason to have a GPS, you can wander around at leisure, going places and looking around just for the heck of it, and when you're done, it'll take you back to the main route.
In few cases when that might be true it's easy to pre-plan it...
GPS is just like a pre-plan when all goes according to the plan - only better, since it adjusts when you make a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, and someone with a static route is lost after one.
or even ask somebody along the way / make a quick phonecall to known local resident when close to destination and lost (also - they, or other people who often travel the route you are planning to take, know much more than GPS: which way is more pleasant
No, actually they don't. Most people memorize a route to where they live, things VERY close to it, and places they go often, but they're probably entirely clueless about even the rest of the general vicinity. And the routes they DO know well they know too well, they give advice that is lacking because they take things for granted. You also need to know where you are to be able to ask. And even when everything goes well, asking takes you back to having a pre-plan - one mistake and you're lost.
Bacteria have no such knowledge, no way to make decisions, and no intelligence to support them, unless of course you adhere to a certain religious view, in which case why would anyone be surprised at the bacteria's survival "strategy".
Of course they do. Bacteria have knowledge instilled into them by evolution rather than by humans.
Software produced by a genetic algorithm would be a pretty good match - external factors (humans/environment) enforce the wanted outcome, but the system does make decisions that help it reach that result.
Not really...I am mostly concerned with software developers making money for developing software. I suppose that is not clear from any of my posts.
People who work for companies that make shiny shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes sold to end-users are few and far between, vast majority of all software developers are making money for developing customized in-house software, a market which would probably not even notice if copyrights were abolished tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you got the idea that this is supposed to be a cure-all, it's not. There's some promising research on few specific autoimmune disorders - mostly on Crohn's disease - and a lot more ongoing on this, the theory is pretty sound, not quackery (though it's probably too early to tell if it turns out to work, so the same can't necessarily be said for the peddlers).
The helminths used are hookworms and whipworms. As you say, hookworms can cause anemia, and I think the same is true for trichuris as well, but that's because in "natural" infestations there are often thousands of them. AFAIK, it's been pretty well established in parasitology long before anyone thought they might have any benefit that infections with small number of worms are almost always asymptomatic. The species used aren't capable of causing autoinfection either so the load stays constant. It does appear reasonably safe - and the drugs for getting rid of the darn things are well known and very effective if someone does go wrong.
There are quite a few opportunistic pathogens that are non-specialized, eg. soil bacteria that are normally free-living but if you're exposed with a weakened immune system or manage to get them into a wound, you may be in trouble. I imagine some space bugs might be dangerous in similar way, but indeed, spreading like wildfire from people to people is a mere fantasy - unless it's genetically engineered by the Evil Aliens(TM), of course.
Really? How about the Great Tenochtitlan which was a city before Paris was anything but a mound of mud?
Is that so? Funny, considering Paris already had a population of tens of thousands over a thousand years before Tenochtitlan was anything but a mount of mud, and had 250000 people around the time Aztecs started building their city in 1300's.
Here is a map of Paris a hundred years before Tenochtitlan was established. Feel free to hang it on the wall for your viewing pleasure.
How probable is it that a planet has an ozone layer in somewhat upper atmosphere?
How is this relevant? Earth did not have ozone layer before it had life. Life made the ozone layer possible (by pumping the atmosphere full of oxygen), not the other way around.
How probable is it that the one liquid available in enormous quantity is extremely weird, compared to many other liquids
Very probable, considering the said liquid, no matter "weird" it is, is the most common molecule in the freaking universe.
The difference is that in RH system that functionality is all in rpm and yum and you can find it by reading the manpages for them, it may be just as doable in Debian, but it's scattered into half a dozen separate utilities (like debsums) you just have to Know about, and many of them are not in the base system.
But 1. Facebook only has an either/or black/white switch, with only two groups (friends and non-friends) and only two settings (can always see, and can never see).
Entirely, and totally wrong. You can control every single thing you post down to an individual person, or lists of people that you maintain.
2) is true, of course, but it's not a Facebook specific issue, it's a problem with every centralized service.
From my perspective as an outsider who does catch a fair bit of America-centric media, the problem the US is having isn't that its citizenry doesn't care. It's that there are several extremely loud contingents of the population that are misinformed, not uninformed.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, they depend on each other. If the rest of the population cared, few misinformed groups, no matter how loud, would not be able to wield the influence they do now that the others are apathetic.
Definitions were upgraded, though, weren't they? Just the engine was a year old...
For now. But they would not have been any longer.
That's what this is about, the definition updates grew over some size limit that triggers a bug in the older engine version, so they could either stop sending updates to them, or send an update that breaks the old engine. They chose to do the latter to avoid false sense of security, and also managed to include an error message in the update to tell people what it's about.
I would have been happy as a ... clam... if the way this went down was for me to simply find my log files full of warnings this morning.
Your log files have been full of warnings for half a year. You've ignored them. You WOULD have ignored the warnings this morning too, stop kidding yourself.
I'm sorry? Life did start out oxygen- and water-free.
Here? Oxygen-free, yes. Water-free hell no. Elsewhere? Well, we'll talk about that when we find some.
Where do you think all that stuff comes from? It's processed poop. Nothing else.
Uhh, stars? Oxygen is a fusion end result, the third most abundant element in existence. I probably don't need to go into hydrogen, and the conditions for combining the two aren't exactly rare either. Water is one of the most common molecules in the universe, it's everywhere, and certainly predates any life by far. And unlike oxygen which is so reactive it tends to end up as a part of something else, water sticks around once you have it.
Because when a launch fails, it doesn't just magically disappear. It will fall somewhere. "Oh dear lord, they are launching again! Quick, everyone into your shelters!"
Launches fail, even the current ridiculously overengineered launch vehicles, and the launch sites have been selected with that in mind. When things fall, they fall in an ocean or middle of nowhere. Big deal.
I'm not a developer, but seriously, how hard can it be to allow the user to drag and drop items in the "Places" widget? The nearly identical bookmarks can be drag-and-dropped.
It's not hard at all to allow drag and drop - what is hard is being able to meaningfully remember and integrate the changes made when some device isn't there. If you drag something to the top-most location, unplug it, drag something else to top, and put the first stick back in, which should be the first? And where should the other one go?
The bookmarks are simple, because they only change when you change them.
Where is my system level ctrl-~ to switch between windows of a single application?
Alt-F6
But I'm allergic to neutrinos, you insensitive clod!
Really? It's ok to harm someone as long as you consider their sensitivity to that harm to be rare and therefore brand them a "freak"?
So do you don a biohazard suit every time you go out? You could run into with severe immunodeficiency, and kill her just by walking by. You filthy murderer.
You might have a point if there really was a "small percentage" (implying at least several people in a hundred) with this kind of sensitivity, but there is a tipping point for everything, and at certain point of rarity it is not up to the society to adapt to the abnormal individual but the other way around. If there was one person in a million with extreme EM sensitivity, should all of humanity turn off their radiation sources? How about one in a billion? One in the entire planet?
We do not sterilize the world and walk around in hermetic suits because there are people without immune systems, we put them in isolation tents - and there were equally rare people who have problems with radiation instead of microbes, we would not stop using electricity, we would put them in faraday cages. Sucks, but life isn't fair.
The comlpaint isn't about a level of radiation that naturally originates from his neighbor's yard. It's about radiation that he alleges only comes from his neighbor's yard due to his neighbor's use of WiFi. That's pretty different from your cherry tree analogy, which is a fairly natural and expected source of pollin.
A planted cherry tree - most likely Japanese or European species alien to the Americas - is no more "natural" than a WiFi AP. They're both there because a human put them there.
As for "expected", both are that - and that's exactly the point - we can and do expect EM radiation and pollen to be everywhere, and if you can't live with that, YOU deal with it instead of the rest of the society.
And (1) looks like it's going to not ever be true again, given tetherable `tubes' on my next cell phone.
If you seriously think cell phone connections are reliable enough for this sort of thing to work, I've some Ubisoft games (and a bridge) to sell.
That's actually one thing we can be quite sure of they *won't* dare sue anybody for, because they just lost an anti-trust lawsuit about file server interoperability in 2004
They may not dare sue anyone about Samba in Europe, but I doubt they're under any compunction about it elsewhere.
Remember Columbia? You don't need "punch" to destroy the shuttle. Hit it with ANYTHING whatsoever, and it handles "breaking everything into small pieces before landfall" all by itself.
What bugs me about the scientific world-view is, basically, for all of human history, groups of people have said "well, trust us, THIS is the shit that's got it all figured out. Just listen to this shit and you'll be A OH TAY."
And what does the science world view tell us?
Science world view tells us we don't know jack shit, and never will, but we'll keep trying to learn as much as possible.
Nobody has nothing figured out.
And scientists would be the first people in the world to proclaim just that. Many probably think their theories are close enough for government work, but no-one in science would EVER claim to have all figured out.
Makes me wonder who and what the fuck are you talking about? Because it obviously ain't science.
What's really shocking is that someone picked up a _correct_ answer to a ridiculous question into ridiculous answers book.
Not sure how representative this part is, but - when NOT driving in known area I'm always never in a real hurry.
Yes? So? All the more reason to have a GPS, you can wander around at leisure, going places and looking around just for the heck of it, and when you're done, it'll take you back to the main route.
In few cases when that might be true it's easy to pre-plan it...
GPS is just like a pre-plan when all goes according to the plan - only better, since it adjusts when you make a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, and someone with a static route is lost after one.
or even ask somebody along the way / make a quick phonecall to known local resident when close to destination and lost (also - they, or other people who often travel the route you are planning to take, know much more than GPS: which way is more pleasant
No, actually they don't. Most people memorize a route to where they live, things VERY close to it, and places they go often, but they're probably entirely clueless about even the rest of the general vicinity. And the routes they DO know well they know too well, they give advice that is lacking because they take things for granted. You also need to know where you are to be able to ask. And even when everything goes well, asking takes you back to having a pre-plan - one mistake and you're lost.
I'd hate to see how it describes a traffic circle.
It tells you to take n'th exit from the circle. Works fine.
Bacteria have no such knowledge, no way to make decisions, and no intelligence to support them, unless of course you adhere to a certain religious view, in which case why would anyone be surprised at the bacteria's survival "strategy".
Of course they do. Bacteria have knowledge instilled into them by evolution rather than by humans.
Software produced by a genetic algorithm would be a pretty good match - external factors (humans/environment) enforce the wanted outcome, but the system does make decisions that help it reach that result.
Not really...I am mostly concerned with software developers making money for developing software. I suppose that is not clear from any of my posts.
People who work for companies that make shiny shrink-wrapped cardboard boxes sold to end-users are few and far between, vast majority of all software developers are making money for developing customized in-house software, a market which would probably not even notice if copyrights were abolished tomorrow.