It means that the people we trust to "keep us safe" are more involved with indulging their perversities than with doing what would work better in terms of gaining intelligence, (let alone any question of who's guilty or innocent, which was not determined at the time all these folks were apprehended and imprisoned); and that half the American public agrees with them.
That oughta keep us safe.
Or maybe the reality is that we don't really need such a large and complex federal agency to deal with diseases as a matter of course, and so they have to regularly create bullshit boogeymen virus scares to maintain the illusion that their budget should be sacrosanct.
That way, when something like Ebola arrives here, we can all run around like chickens with our heads cut off, because we don't have any standing organization with the expertise to deal with it, but it does save us a few bucks on taxes that we can use to buy bigger engines for our Road Queen Family Trucksters and bigger screens for our phones.
Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg.
You were wearing the a bulletproof vest produced by the same designer who made the Emperor's new clothes.
The Flu vaccine is no more effective than random chance, but it's a huge money maker for the pharmaceutical industry.
Another conspiracy against the Common Man!!!
Annual pharmaceutical sales - approximately $1 trillion. http://www2.deloitte.com/conte...
Annual flu vaccine sales - approximately $3 billion. http://www.kaloramainformation...
Hugemoneymakerness index of flu vaccine to pharmaceutical industry - 0.003. (I just created this metric, but you get the idea)
It does seem odd that one symptom of having Ebola, in America at least, is that you immediately go out on the town and/or on trips and cruises. Maybe we aren't giving the Ebola virus the credit it deserves.
Don't worry, there is always some new PANDEMIC VIRUS THAT'S GOING TO KILL US ALL around the corner. As long as the CDC needs funding, there is always a new threat on the horizon. I remember as a kid being scared to death when the CDC announced that the Russian Flu was going to devastate the U.S. Oh, how naive I was back then. My dad just laughed when II came home crying from school because some gullible teacher had thought it wise to scare the shit out of her elementary students. He told me that there was always someone predicting the end of the world, and they were always full of shit. "When real disaster comes, no one ever sees it coming," he concluded.
People see hurricanes and volcanoes coming all the time, and our primate failure to respond leads to real disasters anyway.
Insurers are pushing it free to the consumer, no copay, no deductibler, because the money lies in avoiding the flu and all the attendant expenses, not in the vaccine. One short hospitalization would pay for a huge number of vaccinations. Insurers know their ROI inside and out.
Somebody must have done a good blind controlled study of vaccines vs placebo, not just for effectiveness, but for safety/side effects, to get FDA approval. Where does that stuff live for popular consumption?
The flip side of that is that there is some evidence that the vaccine doesn't actually reduce deaths from flu, because those immune systems are so bad that they die from flu are bad enough that they can't mount a decent defense, even when vaccinated a priori. No consensus on this yet. (Cue the consensus debate)
Never heard of herd immunity? Your minor inconvenience could save an immunocompromised person.
2. With unrestricted illegal immigration, it doesn't matter how immune the rest of the herd is, because we're importing new disease vectors/reservoirs without even a quick physical checkup.
By and large illegal immigrants are healthier than the average American and use fewer "health care resources", something which has been studied for decades now with lots of publications, in the hope that there's something there the rest of us can do. Theories range from "they go back home to die when they get sick" to "they're afraid of authorities so they avoid medical coverage, and that not only doesn't reduce their life expectancy it actually helps it because many of us are overmedicated" to "they retain healthy eating and exercise habits they grew up with". My personal pet theory is that you're selecting a healthy population that would have the capacity to get here illegally.
Normal, otherwise healthy adults can die from the flu too, though it's far more rare.
That was the weirdness of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1917 or thereabouts. Healthy young adults were more likely to die. Nurses, soldiers, etc. Suggested that maybe there was something about that strain that triggered immune overreaction, so those with weaker immune symptoms were protected, paradoxically.
Also more likely to kill the very young or elderly and influenza & pneumonia (they are lumped together) rank above gun violence as a leading causes of death in the US.
If flu victims would only arm themselves, they would no longer be victims. Oops, sorry, reflex post.
me three. discovered this a while back when i was taking a course on videotapes and landed a VCR that could play the tape at 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, etc. and play the sound by skipping bits to keep it in sync. You could follow anything at 1.5x with no problem, at 2X some stuff started to get difficult. Now that digitally you can do it without even losing any audio, so much the better.
Although, the same folks who can't read a 300 word article on something, will happily watch a 5 minute video of some guy talking about it.
See also, nobody at work can send a two sentence email out now, without putting it into a 2 meg powerpoint presentation.
Most folks would be delighted, as would the electric company to a certain degree, with a roof-mounted solar generator that could cover a chunk of the load of their air conditioner on summer afternoons without running up their electric bills, and taxing the grid to the point of brownouts.
That's like saying that you and me are throwing money around protecting the status quo, because the electric companies burn the coal and petroleum the fossil fuel industries produce, and we use the electricity the electric companies produce.
The folks selling whatever crap are in a different position than the folks selling the crap, when a new improved alternative to crap is produced.
"Like the two guys running away from the grizzly bear, security doesn't have to be flawless; it just has to be robust enough to convince the attacker to go after an easier target."
According to the North Korea Did It theory, though, Sony was the one and only target, they weren't going to be discouraged and go over to Paramount.
Exactly! Just like what friggin moron who has *ever* watched the sun rise and set can't tell you that the sun revolves around the earth.
I submitted a proposal to remove the wheels from the sun's winged chariot and see if it hindered the sun from traveling across the heavens, and those shortsighted morons refused to OK it.
Seriously yourself. There was an experiment done by a college grad - meaning it was probably for a paper and not actually necessary - in which the front paws of baby mice were cut off to determine if this affected their grooming habits. Ethics board approved. What friggin' moron who had *ever* watched a mouse groom itself couldn't have given the answer?
Well, to be fair, that would obviously lead to a cure for cancer.
Seriously, though, most institutional ethics boards these days would deny that particular request, unless it was attached to some really convincing rationalization. Like they had some gene that seemed related to autism or something and this would somehow establish that the same gene worked in different mammals or something. Just to satisfy curiosity about mouse habits doesn't cut much ice with most ethics boards. Although the journals who cover this stuff manage to fill pages every month with case studies of ethics committees in various institutions that aren't doing their jobs.
I've worked in places that send you a message that you can't use obscenities in your password if you try. Ironic, because of course that makes them slightly easier to crack.
The place I'm currently at makes me use a 20 character password with characters from at least 3 of 4 groups (numbers, lower case, capitals, punctuation), and to change it every 45 days, and the last 30 passwords cannot be reused. Clearly everyone uses a 'password system' that makes this more insecure, even though it is explicitly denied. Worse, for remote access we have to use three factor authentication (password, pin and RSA token code) anyway. Why can we not just use two factor throughout?
The same company blocks web access to dictionary.com, archive.org and anything related to computer security (hacking) and 3D graphics (games), as well as anything deemed to be file sharing (dropbox, google drive, pastebin - but not gist.github.com or thousands of other similar sites).
Why are such douchebags in charge of IT at such large companies that employ technically competent staff?
CYA; for instance, if you work at a healthcare related company, with the healthcare information privacy protection act they can be seriously damaged if they let private healthcare info out to the wrong people; even leaving a message on somebody's voicemail can be questionable. So, if you set up insanely difficult security, when the inevitable leaks happen, your lawyer just tells the court that the company has done everything possible and they're off the hook. Otherwise, they're screwed, even though whatever they failed to do had nothing to do with the leak.
Slashdot Mirror
It means that the people we trust to "keep us safe" are more involved with indulging their perversities than with doing what would work better in terms of gaining intelligence, (let alone any question of who's guilty or innocent, which was not determined at the time all these folks were apprehended and imprisoned); and that half the American public agrees with them. That oughta keep us safe.
Or maybe the reality is that we don't really need such a large and complex federal agency to deal with diseases as a matter of course, and so they have to regularly create bullshit boogeymen virus scares to maintain the illusion that their budget should be sacrosanct.
That way, when something like Ebola arrives here, we can all run around like chickens with our heads cut off, because we don't have any standing organization with the expertise to deal with it, but it does save us a few bucks on taxes that we can use to buy bigger engines for our Road Queen Family Trucksters and bigger screens for our phones.
Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg.
You were wearing the a bulletproof vest produced by the same designer who made the Emperor's new clothes.
The Flu vaccine is no more effective than random chance, but it's a huge money maker for the pharmaceutical industry.
Another conspiracy against the Common Man!!! Annual pharmaceutical sales - approximately $1 trillion. http://www2.deloitte.com/conte... Annual flu vaccine sales - approximately $3 billion. http://www.kaloramainformation... Hugemoneymakerness index of flu vaccine to pharmaceutical industry - 0.003. (I just created this metric, but you get the idea)
It does seem odd that one symptom of having Ebola, in America at least, is that you immediately go out on the town and/or on trips and cruises. Maybe we aren't giving the Ebola virus the credit it deserves.
Don't worry, there is always some new PANDEMIC VIRUS THAT'S GOING TO KILL US ALL around the corner. As long as the CDC needs funding, there is always a new threat on the horizon. I remember as a kid being scared to death when the CDC announced that the Russian Flu was going to devastate the U.S. Oh, how naive I was back then. My dad just laughed when II came home crying from school because some gullible teacher had thought it wise to scare the shit out of her elementary students. He told me that there was always someone predicting the end of the world, and they were always full of shit. "When real disaster comes, no one ever sees it coming," he concluded.
People see hurricanes and volcanoes coming all the time, and our primate failure to respond leads to real disasters anyway.
Insurers are pushing it free to the consumer, no copay, no deductibler, because the money lies in avoiding the flu and all the attendant expenses, not in the vaccine. One short hospitalization would pay for a huge number of vaccinations. Insurers know their ROI inside and out.
Somebody must have done a good blind controlled study of vaccines vs placebo, not just for effectiveness, but for safety/side effects, to get FDA approval. Where does that stuff live for popular consumption?
The flip side of that is that there is some evidence that the vaccine doesn't actually reduce deaths from flu, because those immune systems are so bad that they die from flu are bad enough that they can't mount a decent defense, even when vaccinated a priori. No consensus on this yet. (Cue the consensus debate)
Never heard of herd immunity? Your minor inconvenience could save an immunocompromised person.
2. With unrestricted illegal immigration, it doesn't matter how immune the rest of the herd is, because we're importing new disease vectors/reservoirs without even a quick physical checkup.
By and large illegal immigrants are healthier than the average American and use fewer "health care resources", something which has been studied for decades now with lots of publications, in the hope that there's something there the rest of us can do. Theories range from "they go back home to die when they get sick" to "they're afraid of authorities so they avoid medical coverage, and that not only doesn't reduce their life expectancy it actually helps it because many of us are overmedicated" to "they retain healthy eating and exercise habits they grew up with". My personal pet theory is that you're selecting a healthy population that would have the capacity to get here illegally.
Normal, otherwise healthy adults can die from the flu too, though it's far more rare.
That was the weirdness of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1917 or thereabouts. Healthy young adults were more likely to die. Nurses, soldiers, etc. Suggested that maybe there was something about that strain that triggered immune overreaction, so those with weaker immune symptoms were protected, paradoxically.
Also more likely to kill the very young or elderly and influenza & pneumonia (they are lumped together) rank above gun violence as a leading causes of death in the US.
If flu victims would only arm themselves, they would no longer be victims. Oops, sorry, reflex post.
me three. discovered this a while back when i was taking a course on videotapes and landed a VCR that could play the tape at 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, etc. and play the sound by skipping bits to keep it in sync. You could follow anything at 1.5x with no problem, at 2X some stuff started to get difficult. Now that digitally you can do it without even losing any audio, so much the better.
Although, the same folks who can't read a 300 word article on something, will happily watch a 5 minute video of some guy talking about it. See also, nobody at work can send a two sentence email out now, without putting it into a 2 meg powerpoint presentation.
Most folks would be delighted, as would the electric company to a certain degree, with a roof-mounted solar generator that could cover a chunk of the load of their air conditioner on summer afternoons without running up their electric bills, and taxing the grid to the point of brownouts.
More and more scientists are beginning to disagree that cigarettes cause global warming.
That's like saying that you and me are throwing money around protecting the status quo, because the electric companies burn the coal and petroleum the fossil fuel industries produce, and we use the electricity the electric companies produce. The folks selling whatever crap are in a different position than the folks selling the crap, when a new improved alternative to crap is produced.
"Like the two guys running away from the grizzly bear, security doesn't have to be flawless; it just has to be robust enough to convince the attacker to go after an easier target." According to the North Korea Did It theory, though, Sony was the one and only target, they weren't going to be discouraged and go over to Paramount.
Why are chairs not people? What exactly separates humans from furniture?
It's getting harder to put food on your family.
there is no way I'm ever extending personhood to non homo sapiens.
Racist. These people deserve the same rights as anyone else, regardless of their ethnic background.
Why can't they just be Americans, instead of Cardassian-Americans?
We already do, I can't torture my pet dog to death without facing jail time for example.
Yes, but Chris Christie is morally certain that you have the right to keep pigs in tiny uncomfortable gestation crates.
Exactly! Just like what friggin moron who has *ever* watched the sun rise and set can't tell you that the sun revolves around the earth.
I submitted a proposal to remove the wheels from the sun's winged chariot and see if it hindered the sun from traveling across the heavens, and those shortsighted morons refused to OK it.
Seriously yourself. There was an experiment done by a college grad - meaning it was probably for a paper and not actually necessary - in which the front paws of baby mice were cut off to determine if this affected their grooming habits. Ethics board approved. What friggin' moron who had *ever* watched a mouse groom itself couldn't have given the answer?
Well, to be fair, that would obviously lead to a cure for cancer. Seriously, though, most institutional ethics boards these days would deny that particular request, unless it was attached to some really convincing rationalization. Like they had some gene that seemed related to autism or something and this would somehow establish that the same gene worked in different mammals or something. Just to satisfy curiosity about mouse habits doesn't cut much ice with most ethics boards. Although the journals who cover this stuff manage to fill pages every month with case studies of ethics committees in various institutions that aren't doing their jobs.
It's not like they're corporations.
I've worked in places that send you a message that you can't use obscenities in your password if you try. Ironic, because of course that makes them slightly easier to crack.
The place I'm currently at makes me use a 20 character password with characters from at least 3 of 4 groups (numbers, lower case, capitals, punctuation), and to change it every 45 days, and the last 30 passwords cannot be reused. Clearly everyone uses a 'password system' that makes this more insecure, even though it is explicitly denied. Worse, for remote access we have to use three factor authentication (password, pin and RSA token code) anyway. Why can we not just use two factor throughout?
The same company blocks web access to dictionary.com, archive.org and anything related to computer security (hacking) and 3D graphics (games), as well as anything deemed to be file sharing (dropbox, google drive, pastebin - but not gist.github.com or thousands of other similar sites).
Why are such douchebags in charge of IT at such large companies that employ technically competent staff?
CYA; for instance, if you work at a healthcare related company, with the healthcare information privacy protection act they can be seriously damaged if they let private healthcare info out to the wrong people; even leaving a message on somebody's voicemail can be questionable. So, if you set up insanely difficult security, when the inevitable leaks happen, your lawyer just tells the court that the company has done everything possible and they're off the hook. Otherwise, they're screwed, even though whatever they failed to do had nothing to do with the leak.