See, it's still painfully obvious you're trying to troll. You even got the funny mod, not a flamebait. No one is going to fall for that. That's just amature shit. You're coming on too strong. Talk about survival of the fittest and refrain from the petty names and someone would have believed you honestly thought that and you could have gotten a string of angry responses. As such you just have me criticizing your technique.
Seems like people on/. always complain about the two real political parties being the exact same, but never care about it enough to make anyone else care about it.
Voting for someone who shares your opinion on an issue not many people have an opinion on is a step in the right direction, but it's a small one. The real way to get it done is to get a canidate who has a fighting chance to endorse that position.
With stuff like this, writing letters to the editor to raise public awareness are more effective than voting for a canidate who may or may not reach the double digits in the election. There are basically three groups who are interested in restricting the internet: idiot moral nannies, people who work in national security and want you to not think outside the box, and telecoms. All of them are doing more than voting to push their political agendas. What are you doing to counter that? If you're doing nothing besides voting and complaining, you're taking the choices someone else gave you, and shouldn't be suprised when
Well, in "There will be blood" they were able to get oil from a well that was gushing out oil, on fire ABOVE ground, by using a cool battering ram thing with a steel drum that had a bunch of dynamite in it. Push it up to the geyser of fire, it explodes, I guess it either disperses all the oxygen or maybe just the high-temperature gasses, and voila, you have just a regular old oil spout, not flaming, ready to be tapped.
So
1. Push a bomb into the ground 2. Blow it up 3. ??? 4. Drink a milkshake.
The system can save money for insurers... For instance, if MedPoint produces a report that an individual has been on the highest dose of the cholesterol-reducing drug Zocor for 18 monts, the insurer "would be able to know that you have a very high, near-intractable cholesterol problem," Dick said, and could avoid a costly blood test.
Sounds reasonable at first, but think for a minute: why would your doctor order a blood test to see if you have cholesterol problems if he or she had already put you on cholesterol medication because he or she knew you had cholesterol problems? Even if you switched doctors, your new doctor should know the results of that test, and at the very least you need to tell him you're on the medication. In other words: your doctor is going to know already.
At best this is a flimsy excuse to invade your privacy and raise your insurance premiums: "By reducing wasteful testing your doctor orders because he/she is an idiot, we save you money, so don't worry about invasions of privacy or your rates going up
But there's another issue that this seems to raise: accountants at your HMO second guessing your doctors. Lets say in the example above your doctor wants to test your cholesterol to see how effective it is or if you actually should still be taking it. Your HMO says "Hey, no, we're not paying for that, we know he has high cholesterol because he's on cholesterol medication, we don't need a test!"
It seems like this could be sorted out with common sense, and like the insurance agencies would have some idea of what's reasonable and what's wasteful, but they don't always. The article mentions that often medications that can be perscribed for two or more different purposes, and the insurance agencies often have a hard time understanding something that simple, denying the woman life insurance because they were convinced she was depressed, when she was actually taking prozac for hot flashes.
If they don't belive the doctor that she was postmenopausal instead of depressed, can we really expect them to use information NOT coming from the doctor correctly, in our best interests?
I agree, the screenshots to this game look slightly better, but only slightly so, and that's the ones they've handpicked. Maybe they spent some more time on the design of things than usual, but I wasn't like "Wow, this is so much better looking than WOW or guild wars." I think what they actually mean is that it looks like final fantasy but plays like wow. It's never good when a new game tries to beat a dominant game at it's own game. All the "halo killers" turned out to suck (Resistance 1, looking right at you.) Zelda killers did too (dark cloud one). Why not make up something totally new? Worried you'll fall flat on your face? Guess what, you're going to do that anyway if you try to make another WOW.
I think a bigger myth that needs to be busted is that in order to make a successful MMO, it needs to be the same type of RPG as WOW. I haven't done an in-depth study, but it seems like developers either spend a lot of time and money on something that is a WOW clone, like this seems to be (a bit premature to call that, I realize) or they half ass it and it, predictably, goes nowhere. Gunz, a free over the shoulder shooting MMORPG seemed really interesting to me, then I find out it's basically broken, no one does anything but exploit gliches. You get what you pay for of course, but even the subscription based MMORPGs seem to either be WOW, WOW clones, or not worth your time.
It's been around a lot longer than Doom 3. I remember playing Marathon back when the only other FPS people played was Doom (1).
The first level it was creepy, after that it felt like the level designers just didn't realize that not all of us knew the level inside and out. "Okay, now even though I can't see it, there's a hunter in a nook halfway up that wall who is going to destroy me unless I launch rockets in that general direction."
Fortunately, bungie included tools that allowed you to play with the physics quite a bit, and the problem was solved by adjusting a slider making it so that flashes from the gun never faded. Fire once and most of the level was plainly visible permanently. Downside: all "sleeping" enemies woke up, but at least you could see them.
Okay I got modded troll I can live with that, but still the Europeans didn't send anyone. By most accounts it looks like a voluntary processes regardless of whether the group was well liked back home.
This is slashdot. No one was upset with the historical inaccuracy, nor the insulting of americans. The troll moderation was for the insinuation that community colleges were for idiots who don't know history.
Indeed, there are several dogmas of science, and they are each found to be violated after a few years.
On the central dogma of molecular biology for example, the dogma holds that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into protein.
With retrovirus though, it goes RNA--> DNA --> RNA --> protein, which is the most blatant violation. Regulatory RNA mollecules also violate the dogma, showing that whole protein step is non-essential.
Given the traditional definition of dogma as something that is inflexible to the point of causing violence, I think it's good that science has started to co-opt it and prove concretely that dogmas can be violated without the general veracity of them falling apart.
Maybe religions will take note. "Hey, the central dogma of mobio has some exceptions but still DNA gets turned into RNA and then gets turned into protein. Maybe if we admit the bread doesn't ACTUALLY become flesh, we won't all go to hell?"
Yeah, crazy thoughts that will probably get me burned at the stake.
No amount of money can repair my psychological damage at having seen two poorly drawn, scantily clad video game characters going on it, but I'll take 2 million.
The article was, predictably, poor in science, but it sounds like the reason the FBI suspected him was that there was an anthrax contamination that he bleached but didn't report and didn't recheck to be sure nothing survived.
While that would have been a good step to take, anthrax microbes by themselves aren't harmful, in order to be a weapon it needs to be processed. Purified anthrax spores are what will send you to the hospital. I don't know how that's done, but the point is that anthrax growing on your lab bench is not the same as having plutonium all over your lab bench. Anthrax bacterial contamination in a fume hood would be an annoyance, not a serious safety issue.
Furthermore, bleach is a heavy duty sterilizing agent. You douse your bench in bleach and you really don't have to worry about residual contamination in most cases. Reswabbing is easy to do and would have been the right thing to do, but it's understandable that he didn't: it's kind of like checking for a pulse in someone you just burned at the stake.
We're of course not getting the full story, and it's more suspicious that his house was in the area the letters were coming from, but from what the article is saying, it sounds like the FBI may have harassed a man into suicide over "evidence" that would have been dismissed as unimportant if it were put into context.
Well, the article does say that their last suspect had just gotten 5 mil for being falsely charged, when there was no evidence he ever had any anthrax.
So... yes, they should do some investigative work. It's been almost 7 years, you would think they could have found some time to actually work rather than just say "Hey, you're a microbiologist, you probably did it."
Hopefully I won't get charged, I did have a microbiology class at some point, and since they apperantly don't use evidence, that puts me on a list probably.
Slashdot Mirror
See, it's still painfully obvious you're trying to troll. You even got the funny mod, not a flamebait. No one is going to fall for that. That's just amature shit. You're coming on too strong. Talk about survival of the fittest and refrain from the petty names and someone would have believed you honestly thought that and you could have gotten a string of angry responses. As such you just have me criticizing your technique.
Seems like people on /. always complain about the two real political parties being the exact same, but never care about it enough to make anyone else care about it.
Voting for someone who shares your opinion on an issue not many people have an opinion on is a step in the right direction, but it's a small one. The real way to get it done is to get a canidate who has a fighting chance to endorse that position.
With stuff like this, writing letters to the editor to raise public awareness are more effective than voting for a canidate who may or may not reach the double digits in the election. There are basically three groups who are interested in restricting the internet: idiot moral nannies, people who work in national security and want you to not think outside the box, and telecoms. All of them are doing more than voting to push their political agendas. What are you doing to counter that? If you're doing nothing besides voting and complaining, you're taking the choices someone else gave you, and shouldn't be suprised when
It sounds like hot fire is already present, throw in "hot heart" and you've got yourself a hot captain planet!
Well, in "There will be blood" they were able to get oil from a well that was gushing out oil, on fire ABOVE ground, by using a cool battering ram thing with a steel drum that had a bunch of dynamite in it. Push it up to the geyser of fire, it explodes, I guess it either disperses all the oxygen or maybe just the high-temperature gasses, and voila, you have just a regular old oil spout, not flaming, ready to be tapped.
So
1. Push a bomb into the ground
2. Blow it up
3. ???
4. Drink a milkshake.
Well, the part of C he didn't talk about was getting the health care you can't afford. Then you have three sub options
C1. Rob a bank
C2. Declare bankrupcy
C3. Establish a fake alter-identity, use that one when you have to pay, file for bankrupcy under that alter-ego
You have more great options under each of those! For instance, in most of those cases, you get to choose between jail and suicide!
Sounds reasonable at first, but think for a minute: why would your doctor order a blood test to see if you have cholesterol problems if he or she had already put you on cholesterol medication because he or she knew you had cholesterol problems? Even if you switched doctors, your new doctor should know the results of that test, and at the very least you need to tell him you're on the medication. In other words: your doctor is going to know already.
At best this is a flimsy excuse to invade your privacy and raise your insurance premiums: "By reducing wasteful testing your doctor orders because he/she is an idiot, we save you money, so don't worry about invasions of privacy or your rates going up
But there's another issue that this seems to raise: accountants at your HMO second guessing your doctors. Lets say in the example above your doctor wants to test your cholesterol to see how effective it is or if you actually should still be taking it. Your HMO says "Hey, no, we're not paying for that, we know he has high cholesterol because he's on cholesterol medication, we don't need a test!"
It seems like this could be sorted out with common sense, and like the insurance agencies would have some idea of what's reasonable and what's wasteful, but they don't always. The article mentions that often medications that can be perscribed for two or more different purposes, and the insurance agencies often have a hard time understanding something that simple, denying the woman life insurance because they were convinced she was depressed, when she was actually taking prozac for hot flashes.
If they don't belive the doctor that she was postmenopausal instead of depressed, can we really expect them to use information NOT coming from the doctor correctly, in our best interests?
I agree, the screenshots to this game look slightly better, but only slightly so, and that's the ones they've handpicked. Maybe they spent some more time on the design of things than usual, but I wasn't like "Wow, this is so much better looking than WOW or guild wars." I think what they actually mean is that it looks like final fantasy but plays like wow. It's never good when a new game tries to beat a dominant game at it's own game. All the "halo killers" turned out to suck (Resistance 1, looking right at you.) Zelda killers did too (dark cloud one). Why not make up something totally new? Worried you'll fall flat on your face? Guess what, you're going to do that anyway if you try to make another WOW.
I think a bigger myth that needs to be busted is that in order to make a successful MMO, it needs to be the same type of RPG as WOW. I haven't done an in-depth study, but it seems like developers either spend a lot of time and money on something that is a WOW clone, like this seems to be (a bit premature to call that, I realize) or they half ass it and it, predictably, goes nowhere. Gunz, a free over the shoulder shooting MMORPG seemed really interesting to me, then I find out it's basically broken, no one does anything but exploit gliches. You get what you pay for of course, but even the subscription based MMORPGs seem to either be WOW, WOW clones, or not worth your time.
It's been around a lot longer than Doom 3. I remember playing Marathon back when the only other FPS people played was Doom (1).
The first level it was creepy, after that it felt like the level designers just didn't realize that not all of us knew the level inside and out. "Okay, now even though I can't see it, there's a hunter in a nook halfway up that wall who is going to destroy me unless I launch rockets in that general direction."
Fortunately, bungie included tools that allowed you to play with the physics quite a bit, and the problem was solved by adjusting a slider making it so that flashes from the gun never faded. Fire once and most of the level was plainly visible permanently. Downside: all "sleeping" enemies woke up, but at least you could see them.
Where do I profit then?
I can't understand the attraction to underlit gaming environments. Maybe it's supposed to be scarier? I just get annoyed when I can't see s***.
I declare a new godwin's law: eventually every slashdot comment section will compare someone to the RIAA, because they are like the nazis.
Uh... and also the old godwin's law is now obsolete and invalid, so it's okay that I just did that.
Well, some people could also download the tools before they go to China, right?
This is slashdot. No one was upset with the historical inaccuracy, nor the insulting of americans. The troll moderation was for the insinuation that community colleges were for idiots who don't know history.
They also typically contribute less to political campaigns.
I wonder if he used a radio-ga-ga telescope to get his data?
As someone going for their PhD, I have to wonder if it actually does.
Because words have power over society.
Indeed, there are several dogmas of science, and they are each found to be violated after a few years.
On the central dogma of molecular biology for example, the dogma holds that DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into protein.
With retrovirus though, it goes RNA--> DNA --> RNA --> protein, which is the most blatant violation. Regulatory RNA mollecules also violate the dogma, showing that whole protein step is non-essential.
Given the traditional definition of dogma as something that is inflexible to the point of causing violence, I think it's good that science has started to co-opt it and prove concretely that dogmas can be violated without the general veracity of them falling apart.
Maybe religions will take note. "Hey, the central dogma of mobio has some exceptions but still DNA gets turned into RNA and then gets turned into protein. Maybe if we admit the bread doesn't ACTUALLY become flesh, we won't all go to hell?"
Yeah, crazy thoughts that will probably get me burned at the stake.
No amount of money can repair my psychological damage at having seen two poorly drawn, scantily clad video game characters going on it, but I'll take 2 million.
Wow, a defender of big oil on slashdot?
What exactly does my mouth have to do anything? Maybe you mean fingers, since they're what I use to type?
I wonder if Oil lobbyists have contributed enough money to the republicans to get them to start throwing their own poop? Time will tell.
At least they're not engaging in fisticuffs.
like they did around the civil war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks#Sumner_Assault
and again in 1902:
http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Fistfight.htm
Or like they do in Bolivia:
http://www.blinkx.com/video/fist-fight-in-bolivia-congress/BUTRtHbu7LQxO1wF
And we can at least be glad no one got shot by the vice president.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks#Sumner_Assault
Er... uh... well, rather at least no one was MURDERED by the vice president in this instance.
The article was, predictably, poor in science, but it sounds like the reason the FBI suspected him was that there was an anthrax contamination that he bleached but didn't report and didn't recheck to be sure nothing survived.
While that would have been a good step to take, anthrax microbes by themselves aren't harmful, in order to be a weapon it needs to be processed. Purified anthrax spores are what will send you to the hospital. I don't know how that's done, but the point is that anthrax growing on your lab bench is not the same as having plutonium all over your lab bench. Anthrax bacterial contamination in a fume hood would be an annoyance, not a serious safety issue.
Furthermore, bleach is a heavy duty sterilizing agent. You douse your bench in bleach and you really don't have to worry about residual contamination in most cases. Reswabbing is easy to do and would have been the right thing to do, but it's understandable that he didn't: it's kind of like checking for a pulse in someone you just burned at the stake.
We're of course not getting the full story, and it's more suspicious that his house was in the area the letters were coming from, but from what the article is saying, it sounds like the FBI may have harassed a man into suicide over "evidence" that would have been dismissed as unimportant if it were put into context.
Well, the article does say that their last suspect had just gotten 5 mil for being falsely charged, when there was no evidence he ever had any anthrax.
So... yes, they should do some investigative work. It's been almost 7 years, you would think they could have found some time to actually work rather than just say "Hey, you're a microbiologist, you probably did it."
Hopefully I won't get charged, I did have a microbiology class at some point, and since they apperantly don't use evidence, that puts me on a list probably.
You know, "Weev" on the front page of TFA is EXACTLY what I picture when I think of trolls or that "frosty piss" guy.