Presumably for the reasons enumerated in the summary. Too many costly, and quite frankly terrifying, false positives. Keep in mind, when you start talk about putting everyone through a screening, whether it be for cancer or HIV or terrorism, your screen had better be crazily accurate. Imagine there's a (really exceptionally good) false positive rate of 0.1% on your hypothetical test, if you give it to every person in the US twice a year you're going to produce 74,000 false positives a year. Or to put it another way, more false negatives than there are cancer deaths.
This summary is a confused mishmash of thoughts. First they talk about how the government pays for offices, utilities, computers, and training then they bring up defense contractors, who aren't the kind of contractors that the earlier statement is talking about (I assure you that defense contractors pay for their own overhead costs). Secondly, in what world does a company having many significant expenses mean that they don't try to optimize the largest one? Companies minimize costs and maximize revenues wherever possible, it is the one thing that they are good at (and why capitalism comes as close to working as it does). Removing some expenses doesn't especially encourage companies to reduce costs in other areas, just like increasing costs doesn't encourage them to gouge their customers, if they could get away with gouging their customers (or employees for that matter) they'd already be doing it.
That all depends what the consequences of doing nothing are doesn't it? Lets say we hit an absolute worst case scenario: the oceans are showing every sign of being at or past the tipping point of an anoxic event, a sudden positive feedback induced drop in global ocean oxygen levels. The effects of the CO2 in the air are still going to be building up for years or even decades even if all man made CO2 production stopped immediately. It's possible with immediate, global, brute force intervention such an event could be averted; the risks of knock on effects be damned, millions and possibly billions will die if we do nothing.
So the real question is where is the cutoff point. At what point do the risks of unintended consequences outweigh the risks of doing nothing at all. Flooding of coastal areas? Dust bowl style droughts for years on end? Flooding of formerly desert regions? Ironically, we don't have the technology or will to directly address the threats of global warming. Significantly cutting CO2 emissions just isn't possible today without significant loss of life or at least quality of life. We probably do, however, have the means to address warming in a brute force way. Spreading particulates into the upper atmosphere might not sound great, but if the global temperature is 2C higher than it was during the rest of recent history it may be preferable to the alternative.
I thought we were passed this. All three consoles sold more than 50 million units. No one lost, everyone won; with Nintendo winning a lot more granted especially given they've been making a profit on their sales since day one. I do have to wonder how many units they each sold to unique customers though, I know I had to replace my 60gb launch PS3, and the RROD debacle surely skewed the 360s numbers a bit.
I think you give them too much credit. Personally, I can't wait to hear the talking heads talk about the time-tables for the next-next-gen consoles and how much better they are than the next-gen consoles.
Elemental mercury accumulates, organomercury compounds do not. The compound in vaccines has a half life of 18 days and is removed from the body through fecal extraction.
Fair enough, I qualify my statement thusly: Thiomersal in the quantities, concentrations, and delivery mechanisms used for vaccines is nontoxic. Is that better?
Of course I acknowledge that mercury causes neurological disorders, elemental mercury is intensely dangerous, especially for children. But then I tell you what, if you don't believe that there's a difference, over the course of the today I'll eat a gram of sodium today if you do. Except, I get to choose which compound I get to ingest, you have to ingest the elemental version. Let me know how it goes.
The point, which I thought was obvious, is that the chlorine is salt is not toxic. Similar to how the mercury in vaccines is not toxic. It is silly to try to extrapolate the chemical behavior of a molecule based on the behavior of the elements that make it up. Otherwise we could all breath water (plenty of oxygen in there right?) or use it to inflate a blimp (with all that hydrogen). Not to mention the fact that even if the mercury in vaccines were bioavailable and had a long half life, the amounts we are talking about are so tiny that you can easily ingest more mercury from a can of tuna than from a years worth of vaccines.
A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood.
No, they haven't; in fact not a single case has been. One crank researcher being paid by anti-vaccine lawyers made that assertion in a fraudulent study of 12 self selected children who were already exhibiting signs of autism before the study started. Since then, every major piece of research has shown no link between vaccines of any kind and autism.
Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede.
Nope, autism rates have remained steady or increased when mercury was removed from vaccines. Children who don't receive vaccines are no more or less likely to develop autism than children that do. Children in places where mercury has been removed or vaccines discontinued have the same rates of autism as before.
What makes you believe that mercury would[sic][I assume you mean 'should'?] be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation?
Because it makes delivery of vaccines to rural areas possible, reduces the risk of infections caused by spoiled vaccines, and has been demonstrated to be safe.
Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever.
As I said it makes preservation without refridgeration possible, making vaccines safer to ship and store, especially in rural areas (not as much of a problem in modern US granted). Atomic mercury does indeed cause brain damage and stays int he body long term, atomic mercury is not what is used in vaccines. The compound in vaccines is not retained by the way elemental mercury is, it has a halflife of 18 days (it's actually removed from the brain even faster than that) and it does not interact biologically the same way elemental mercury does. You may as well avoid salt since Sodium and Chlorine are both poisonous
It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
This is a global problem, caused by coal fired power plants and has little, if anything to do with the mercury in vaccines controversy beyond trying to establish the boogeyman. Actually, though, maybe this can help understanding. The amount of mercury in a typical vaccines, contains as much mercury as 50 grams of tuna. Even pregnant women and children can eat a can of tuna a couple times a week without being exposed to dangerous levels of mercury.
Wildly different biological properties as well (although that's arguably redundant). The mercury in vaccines isn't bioavailable in any significant way so the body doesn't absorb it like it does atomic mercury. Even more importantly, it doesn't accumulate in the body the way atomic mercury does, any damage the tiny amount of mercury would do is limited to the one or two days it's in your system before it is passed out. Compared to atomic mercury which accumulates so much so that it will literally turn your hair red with continuous exposure.
Like saying chlorine is poisonous so it should be banned and then cracking down on the importation of salt; this treaty shows a profound lack of chemistry and biology education.
Re:What about the creators?
on
The Case For Piracy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's hard to argue with supply and demand. Once created, the supply of your work is infinite, it is effectively 0 cost to make another copy. Having an unlimited supply is going to drive prices down to near zero as a matter of course. Rather than asking 'why' you shouldn't be paid, you should be asking 'how'.
You can try to artificially restrict your supply with DRM but that pisses off your customers. You can try to litigate, in which case you aren't really selling your works, you're selling a no sue guarantee, and also pisses off your customers (especially since if you sue enough people you will eventually catch an innocent person in your net).
Or you can accept that some X% of your users are going to pirate, and you can charge the rest enough to make your money. Some anecdotal evidence even suggests that properly managed piracy can increase sales, so actively go out and use the pirates as a free advertising agency. More radically, you can put your old works out in public domain, and make a preorder for your next work available, basically a modern day, crowd sourced patronage model. I can think of at least one author who has managed that effectively (Charles Stross). Or you can publish your works to your blog and get some extra money from advertising. Or, if your product is software, you can give it away for individuals but require payment from businesses (who are less likely to pirate given the higher risks they face).
For instance, do all students know that they are payig interest rates comparable to normal loans, yet with normal loans a borrower can default on a loan.
You will never find a 14 year, collateral-less loan that banks will give to a jobless 18 year old student, at any interest rate, they simply don't exist, and for good reason. The government backing is the only thing that makes such remarkably low rates possible, and the default-less nature is the only thing that makes the government guarantee possible.
The patents they're accused of violating are ridiculous, it's not a case of ignoring them, it's a case of not realizing the patent office is stupid enough to give a patent for a "rectangular device with a minimal number of physical buttons" or "A photo viewing app that switches between photos by swiping".
To be fair, the original idea was that the machines were using our brains for processing power which is at least logical. Executive meddling said that was too hard for people to understand so instead we got the brain meltingly stupid explanation in the movie instead.
Maybe they got tired of having to qualify every eBook price with "This price was set by the publisher".
Want to know what's wrong with the eBook market? Just check out this page; $15 for a poorly scanned version of a book that was written more than 40 years ago, that's available new in paperback and even hardcover for less. Seriously? Who the hell comes up with these pricing models? Even as a huge eBook fan there's been plenty of books that I've passed on because I just can't justify the cost for a digital copy, even ignoring the fact that the digital copy is DRM'd to Amazon's tool set.
The whole time I was reading the analogy I was expecting him to finish with "That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way." With apologies to Sir Pterry.
Why can't they just open the API up to all developers. When a new app installs (or whenever for that matter) it should be able to register words as actions associated with it and which options to call for which actions. Anything after the action word can be passed as parameters if it makes sense for that action. So instead of the Voice Action app having to parse "text Jane where are we going to dinner" it would simply parse the word "text" and pass "Jane where are we going to dinner" to the texting app to let them deal with it.
If a word has more than one action associated with it, display them in a list (just like it does now when Android isn't sure what you want) and let the user pick and/or let the user pick defaults. You could even open up the list of actions to let the users modify, add, delete directly, so if you don't like the default words for certain actions you can change them. Loads more flexibility and extensibility. Data parsing gets moved to where it makes sense (the app who knows what the data looks like). Anyone know why it doesn't work like this?
One difference here is that a failure that affects one of your wireless links is more likely to affect both. A burst of interference microwave could easily knock out the connection to both brakes simultaneously. Basically there's only one medium the signal is being sent through, whereas with mechanical breaks there are two. You can alleviate that somewhat by using widely separated frequencies, but wide spectrum interference (such as a leaky microwave) will still cause problems.
If you think bullies are all about beating people up and taking their lunch money, you haven't spent any time around teenage girls or any adults in an office environment for that matter. Give people power over other people and some number of them will abuse it. In grade school that power is in terms of hitting puberty a few years before their peers and having extra muscle mass. People associate that with bullying because the effects are obvious and the kids are least equiped to deal with it. But even by high school you can have social bullies, technical bullies, and, yes indeed, even technology bullies.
Didn't stop the union protesters in WI last year (although that was freezing rain, not just frost). Of course, they had something concrete that they were protesting against and an easily definable goal. The Madison police also managed to not arrest anyone unnecessarily in that case (possibly because they are public sector union employees themselves, although the law doesn't effect them directly). And then again, the protesters in WI were smart enough and careful enough not to do anything remotely illegal.
You're assuming what they are doing is illegal. It's entirely possible, likely even, that everything they are doing is perfectly allowable under the IRS's own rules. Some where on their website they explain the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance; avoidance is perfectly legal, evasion is not.
Look at it this way. Imagine you're trying to give a speech, but the people in the back of the room can't hear you. I've got a bullhorn handy, is it my duty to give it to you so that you can be heard? What if I make my living by renting out bullhorns to public speakers? If I ask you for $1 in exchange for the bullhorn is that wrong?
I never said it didn't make life easier, in fact I said quite the opposite. All I said was that it wasn't a requirement to have a normal healthy life, and considering you yourself are able to live without it I can't see how you can disagree with that. They offer a product, they trade access to said product in exchange for your personal information. If your information is more valuable to you than their product, don't sign up.
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Presumably for the reasons enumerated in the summary. Too many costly, and quite frankly terrifying, false positives. Keep in mind, when you start talk about putting everyone through a screening, whether it be for cancer or HIV or terrorism, your screen had better be crazily accurate. Imagine there's a (really exceptionally good) false positive rate of 0.1% on your hypothetical test, if you give it to every person in the US twice a year you're going to produce 74,000 false positives a year. Or to put it another way, more false negatives than there are cancer deaths.
This summary is a confused mishmash of thoughts. First they talk about how the government pays for offices, utilities, computers, and training then they bring up defense contractors, who aren't the kind of contractors that the earlier statement is talking about (I assure you that defense contractors pay for their own overhead costs). Secondly, in what world does a company having many significant expenses mean that they don't try to optimize the largest one? Companies minimize costs and maximize revenues wherever possible, it is the one thing that they are good at (and why capitalism comes as close to working as it does). Removing some expenses doesn't especially encourage companies to reduce costs in other areas, just like increasing costs doesn't encourage them to gouge their customers, if they could get away with gouging their customers (or employees for that matter) they'd already be doing it.
That all depends what the consequences of doing nothing are doesn't it? Lets say we hit an absolute worst case scenario: the oceans are showing every sign of being at or past the tipping point of an anoxic event, a sudden positive feedback induced drop in global ocean oxygen levels. The effects of the CO2 in the air are still going to be building up for years or even decades even if all man made CO2 production stopped immediately. It's possible with immediate, global, brute force intervention such an event could be averted; the risks of knock on effects be damned, millions and possibly billions will die if we do nothing.
So the real question is where is the cutoff point. At what point do the risks of unintended consequences outweigh the risks of doing nothing at all. Flooding of coastal areas? Dust bowl style droughts for years on end? Flooding of formerly desert regions? Ironically, we don't have the technology or will to directly address the threats of global warming. Significantly cutting CO2 emissions just isn't possible today without significant loss of life or at least quality of life. We probably do, however, have the means to address warming in a brute force way. Spreading particulates into the upper atmosphere might not sound great, but if the global temperature is 2C higher than it was during the rest of recent history it may be preferable to the alternative.
I thought we were passed this. All three consoles sold more than 50 million units. No one lost, everyone won; with Nintendo winning a lot more granted especially given they've been making a profit on their sales since day one. I do have to wonder how many units they each sold to unique customers though, I know I had to replace my 60gb launch PS3, and the RROD debacle surely skewed the 360s numbers a bit.
I think you give them too much credit. Personally, I can't wait to hear the talking heads talk about the time-tables for the next-next-gen consoles and how much better they are than the next-gen consoles.
Elemental mercury accumulates, organomercury compounds do not. The compound in vaccines has a half life of 18 days and is removed from the body through fecal extraction.
Fair enough, I qualify my statement thusly: Thiomersal in the quantities, concentrations, and delivery mechanisms used for vaccines is nontoxic. Is that better?
Fecal excretion. It's pooped out.
Of course I acknowledge that mercury causes neurological disorders, elemental mercury is intensely dangerous, especially for children. But then I tell you what, if you don't believe that there's a difference, over the course of the today I'll eat a gram of sodium today if you do. Except, I get to choose which compound I get to ingest, you have to ingest the elemental version. Let me know how it goes.
It's not nontoxic because you put it in a vaccines, it's nontoxic because it's part of the molecule C9H9HgNaO2S.
The point, which I thought was obvious, is that the chlorine is salt is not toxic. Similar to how the mercury in vaccines is not toxic. It is silly to try to extrapolate the chemical behavior of a molecule based on the behavior of the elements that make it up. Otherwise we could all breath water (plenty of oxygen in there right?) or use it to inflate a blimp (with all that hydrogen). Not to mention the fact that even if the mercury in vaccines were bioavailable and had a long half life, the amounts we are talking about are so tiny that you can easily ingest more mercury from a can of tuna than from a years worth of vaccines.
A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood.
No, they haven't; in fact not a single case has been. One crank researcher being paid by anti-vaccine lawyers made that assertion in a fraudulent study of 12 self selected children who were already exhibiting signs of autism before the study started. Since then, every major piece of research has shown no link between vaccines of any kind and autism.
Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede.
Nope, autism rates have remained steady or increased when mercury was removed from vaccines. Children who don't receive vaccines are no more or less likely to develop autism than children that do. Children in places where mercury has been removed or vaccines discontinued have the same rates of autism as before.
What makes you believe that mercury would[sic][I assume you mean 'should'?] be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation?
Because it makes delivery of vaccines to rural areas possible, reduces the risk of infections caused by spoiled vaccines, and has been demonstrated to be safe.
Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever.
As I said it makes preservation without refridgeration possible, making vaccines safer to ship and store, especially in rural areas (not as much of a problem in modern US granted). Atomic mercury does indeed cause brain damage and stays int he body long term, atomic mercury is not what is used in vaccines. The compound in vaccines is not retained by the way elemental mercury is, it has a halflife of 18 days (it's actually removed from the brain even faster than that) and it does not interact biologically the same way elemental mercury does. You may as well avoid salt since Sodium and Chlorine are both poisonous
It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
This is a global problem, caused by coal fired power plants and has little, if anything to do with the mercury in vaccines controversy beyond trying to establish the boogeyman. Actually, though, maybe this can help understanding. The amount of mercury in a typical vaccines, contains as much mercury as 50 grams of tuna. Even pregnant women and children can eat a can of tuna a couple times a week without being exposed to dangerous levels of mercury.
Wildly different biological properties as well (although that's arguably redundant). The mercury in vaccines isn't bioavailable in any significant way so the body doesn't absorb it like it does atomic mercury. Even more importantly, it doesn't accumulate in the body the way atomic mercury does, any damage the tiny amount of mercury would do is limited to the one or two days it's in your system before it is passed out. Compared to atomic mercury which accumulates so much so that it will literally turn your hair red with continuous exposure.
Like saying chlorine is poisonous so it should be banned and then cracking down on the importation of salt; this treaty shows a profound lack of chemistry and biology education.
It's hard to argue with supply and demand. Once created, the supply of your work is infinite, it is effectively 0 cost to make another copy. Having an unlimited supply is going to drive prices down to near zero as a matter of course. Rather than asking 'why' you shouldn't be paid, you should be asking 'how'.
You can try to artificially restrict your supply with DRM but that pisses off your customers. You can try to litigate, in which case you aren't really selling your works, you're selling a no sue guarantee, and also pisses off your customers (especially since if you sue enough people you will eventually catch an innocent person in your net).
Or you can accept that some X% of your users are going to pirate, and you can charge the rest enough to make your money. Some anecdotal evidence even suggests that properly managed piracy can increase sales, so actively go out and use the pirates as a free advertising agency. More radically, you can put your old works out in public domain, and make a preorder for your next work available, basically a modern day, crowd sourced patronage model. I can think of at least one author who has managed that effectively (Charles Stross). Or you can publish your works to your blog and get some extra money from advertising. Or, if your product is software, you can give it away for individuals but require payment from businesses (who are less likely to pirate given the higher risks they face).
For instance, do all students know that they are payig interest rates comparable to normal loans, yet with normal loans a borrower can default on a loan.
You will never find a 14 year, collateral-less loan that banks will give to a jobless 18 year old student, at any interest rate, they simply don't exist, and for good reason. The government backing is the only thing that makes such remarkably low rates possible, and the default-less nature is the only thing that makes the government guarantee possible.
The patents they're accused of violating are ridiculous, it's not a case of ignoring them, it's a case of not realizing the patent office is stupid enough to give a patent for a "rectangular device with a minimal number of physical buttons" or "A photo viewing app that switches between photos by swiping".
To be fair, the original idea was that the machines were using our brains for processing power which is at least logical. Executive meddling said that was too hard for people to understand so instead we got the brain meltingly stupid explanation in the movie instead.
Maybe they got tired of having to qualify every eBook price with "This price was set by the publisher".
Want to know what's wrong with the eBook market? Just check out this page; $15 for a poorly scanned version of a book that was written more than 40 years ago, that's available new in paperback and even hardcover for less. Seriously? Who the hell comes up with these pricing models? Even as a huge eBook fan there's been plenty of books that I've passed on because I just can't justify the cost for a digital copy, even ignoring the fact that the digital copy is DRM'd to Amazon's tool set.
The whole time I was reading the analogy I was expecting him to finish with "That is a very graphic analogy which aids understanding wonderfully while being, strictly speaking, wrong in every possible way." With apologies to Sir Pterry.
Why can't they just open the API up to all developers. When a new app installs (or whenever for that matter) it should be able to register words as actions associated with it and which options to call for which actions. Anything after the action word can be passed as parameters if it makes sense for that action. So instead of the Voice Action app having to parse "text Jane where are we going to dinner" it would simply parse the word "text" and pass "Jane where are we going to dinner" to the texting app to let them deal with it.
If a word has more than one action associated with it, display them in a list (just like it does now when Android isn't sure what you want) and let the user pick and/or let the user pick defaults. You could even open up the list of actions to let the users modify, add, delete directly, so if you don't like the default words for certain actions you can change them. Loads more flexibility and extensibility. Data parsing gets moved to where it makes sense (the app who knows what the data looks like). Anyone know why it doesn't work like this?
One difference here is that a failure that affects one of your wireless links is more likely to affect both. A burst of interference microwave could easily knock out the connection to both brakes simultaneously. Basically there's only one medium the signal is being sent through, whereas with mechanical breaks there are two. You can alleviate that somewhat by using widely separated frequencies, but wide spectrum interference (such as a leaky microwave) will still cause problems.
If you think bullies are all about beating people up and taking their lunch money, you haven't spent any time around teenage girls or any adults in an office environment for that matter. Give people power over other people and some number of them will abuse it. In grade school that power is in terms of hitting puberty a few years before their peers and having extra muscle mass. People associate that with bullying because the effects are obvious and the kids are least equiped to deal with it. But even by high school you can have social bullies, technical bullies, and, yes indeed, even technology bullies.
Didn't stop the union protesters in WI last year (although that was freezing rain, not just frost). Of course, they had something concrete that they were protesting against and an easily definable goal. The Madison police also managed to not arrest anyone unnecessarily in that case (possibly because they are public sector union employees themselves, although the law doesn't effect them directly). And then again, the protesters in WI were smart enough and careful enough not to do anything remotely illegal.
You're assuming what they are doing is illegal. It's entirely possible, likely even, that everything they are doing is perfectly allowable under the IRS's own rules. Some where on their website they explain the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance; avoidance is perfectly legal, evasion is not.
Look at it this way. Imagine you're trying to give a speech, but the people in the back of the room can't hear you. I've got a bullhorn handy, is it my duty to give it to you so that you can be heard? What if I make my living by renting out bullhorns to public speakers? If I ask you for $1 in exchange for the bullhorn is that wrong?
I never said it didn't make life easier, in fact I said quite the opposite. All I said was that it wasn't a requirement to have a normal healthy life, and considering you yourself are able to live without it I can't see how you can disagree with that. They offer a product, they trade access to said product in exchange for your personal information. If your information is more valuable to you than their product, don't sign up.