What is the point of memorizing information when you can look it up in a book?
Q) What's the point of having 1st, 2nd and 3rd level caches, and DRAM when you can swap to and from a 1TB disk? A) Latency.
That said, there is no point memorizing/caching useless information, or information which is not involved in much synthesis or processing, or information for tasks which tolerate high latencies.
So memorization is still useful and will always be useful. Of course if they ever start making better neural interfaces, we can artificially enhance our memories with fairly low latencies.
Basically you could associate brain patterns/sequences (thought-macros) with objects and tasks. So just thinking of someone (followed by a "start command sequence", "quick-recall-end"[1]) would get your e-brain to recall whatever it has on that someone (which you saved by associating the objects - videos, pics, text, structured data, with the thought pattern you get when you think of that person).
Of course, in a DRM infested world there would likely be many artificial limits and parasitic costs associated with such devices. These would be the cost of copyright laws. Humans would be more crippled than they would be otherwise.
Then the title would be "how bad laws make us stupid";).
[1] The "quick-recall-end" thought macro saves you time - you don't have to think of the "end command sequence" thought pattern (which would be required for more complicated/intensive stuff).
GP's point is that waste is only something to worry about when you also have scarcity.
Waste can still be a problem if there is totally no scarcity, since waste heat will become an issue if everyone can use as much energy as they want. The Earth may even start glowing red/white hot (everyone would be having heat pumps etc, facing out to space):). While you certainly could still live under such conditions (lots of energy to throw at the problem), it would be a rather ugly situation.
As for "standby waste" power, the "stand by" power draw of the modern "energy star" stuff is already tiny enough to put it at the bottom of the "need to use less energy" list.
These devices use 1 watt or less when on stand by. 1 watt for 24 hours is 86400 joules.
1 litre of petrol is 34 megajoules. Making unnecessary trips or taking the wrong route will use up more energy. One double cheese burger gives you 2 megajoules. The amount of energy to produce a double cheese burger is probably more than 2 megajoules.
It takes 4186 joules to raise about 1 litre of water one degree C. Assuming the water is 25 degrees C, it would take about 314000 joules to boil water at sea level.
So basically wasting resources just to cut standby power further makes little sense (unless it is trivial and very cheap to do so) and is more of a "feel good" thing. It's better to focus on cutting energy on other far more energy intensive stuff - heating, airconditioning, dryers, washing machines in "warm/hot wash", long commutes, ovens.
I wonder if it makes sense to have domestic ovens with better insulation (e.g. aerogels) - so perhaps you could retain and reuse the heat from the previous day's baking/roast, whether by keeping it in place or by transferring the heat to store it and transferring it back when needed.
but 15 cm isn't that far either, it's probably not going to replace all cords anytime soon.
There'd be a limit to distance (and power output), otherwise more people would be getting free power from their neighbours whether intentionally or not.
And people would be complaining that the stuff is making them ill, filing lawsuits etc.
Most of Acid3 is mainstream web standards. Yes, some of it is esoteric, but mostly it's basic features that have been standards for many years. This includes CSS2, JavaScript, DOM, and SVG.
OK and which of those "mainstream web standards" are the browsers failing?
IE, firefox etc seem to be scoring about 95% on the acid3 test. So does that mean that:
a) The browsers are actually good enough nowadays (they weren't before when they were scoring lower). b) The acid3 test is useless - the browsers are scoring high because acid3 doesn't test enough important mainstream bits that the browsers are failing.
Can't remember that, because normally when I hear "Gartner", I think "Bullshit". But that's my personal bias, so I was just wondering if my bias is unfounded:).
For my tiny country of 20+ million people, if our political leaders ever _starts_ a war against another country, it could actually be patriotic to kill those leaders.
Yes, depending on the border we could have more oil/fish or less. But many rich countries don't have that much in terms of natural resources.
In fact in many countries that have lots of oil or other natural resource, the leaders don't need the people, and so don't care at all - they just split the wealth between some foreigners and themselves.
Not if the screens actually only appear in your mind. They are making some progress, not sure if they'll succeed that soon or at all in producing hires displays that you can see in your "mind's eye".
I'm against vaccines where:
Mortality rate of vaccine * number of vaccinated > mortality rate of disease * number of infected. or:
Adverse effect rate * number of a vaccinated > adverse effect rate of disease * number of infected.
And it is possible to have a scenario where mass vaccination could do more harm than the disease even if the disease has a high mortality rate.
For example, say you had an Ebola vaccine that killed 1/5000 of those vaccinated. And that Ebola killed 90% of those infected.
You should still not mass vaccinate _everyone_ with that Ebola vaccine, because Ebola doesn't spread that well.
(FWIW, I don't think the real Ebola vaccine currently in trials is that dangerous)
Basically mass vaccinations are self-inflicted "pandemics". If these resulting vaccine "pandemics" are worse than the disease (assuming the usual nonvaccine countermeasures like quarantine, restrictions on travel, and limited vaccination to just groups at risk), then mass vaccinations are not justified.
I'm not saying all of these mass vaccinations are unjustified.
It just annoys me when people say stuff like "the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering."
OK I phrased that incorrectly. I meant that in the vaccine case you are already healthy[1], so the vaccine can't make you better. It can only make you worse.
But my other points still stand. Mass vaccinations are self inflicted pandemics. Thus they must be much safer compared to the disease, assuming countermeasures such as quarantine.
[1] For most of the mass vaccines I know of, it's recommended to wait till you are healthy before you take the vaccine.
First of all, the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering.
Citation please? What's your level of "unbelievably small" and "not worth even considering"?
Second of all, you are completely ignoring the social side of this.
Yes I am, because I was talking about a different issue. Maybe your reply should be to a different post?
I was assuming most readers on slashdot (nerd land) already know the social benefits of vaccines.
I'm talking about the costs. To me it seems a lot of people still don't understand the costs and safety issues. They aren't like normal medication/treatment.
1 person out of 5000 getting sick from a vaccine (generously bad number) is nothing compared to what happens when people don't get vaccinated and the disease hits everyone.
Bullshit.
1/5000 getting sick from normal medication is a pretty good statistic. Because as I said in my post, not everyone will be getting it, and only the few who are sick. 1/5000 getting sick from a mass vaccine is pretty bad when you're dealing with millions or even billions of people.
The 2009 flu pandemic only killed 18000 people, and the WHO made a big fuss about it. Whereas if you gave a flu vaccine to 6 billion people that killed 1 in 5000, there would be 1.2 million dead because of the crappy vaccine.
A mass administered flu vaccine must not kill more than 1 in 333333 people to be not as bad as this flu.
And the low H1N1 fatalities weren't mainly because of the vaccine (since most people didn't take it). I didn't get the H1N1 flu (or if I did, it wasn't really bad to me), I didn't get the vaccine either, but my colleague sitting next to me got the flu (I suspect her hamsters died of it too:( ). So a mass flu vaccine better be really safe, or the flu strain better be really dangerous. Otherwise we'd just resort to quarantines.
These mass vaccines are basically self inflicted pandemics, so the fatalities and adverse effects must be MUCH lower than the expected real world fatalities in their absence. Not just slightly lower, MUCH lower. Because they cost resources.
Also, typically in order to get the vaccine, people need to go to places with lots of infectious people, or be in contact with someone who has recently been in contact with thousands of potentially infectious people. Slashdot dweller in basement is pretty safe till he goes out to get the vaccine.
Despite your claims, a lot of these diseases won't hit everyone just because some people don't get vaccinated.
So to me this "vaccines are really safe" thinking that you share is just as dangerous as the hysterical cries that "vaccines made my kid a retard".
For example the HPV vaccine. Requiring mass HPV vaccination would just benefit the corporations making the vaccines (and yes there are calls for it to be mass administered). But not everyone will get HPV, and not everyone will have problems resulting from it.
So stop being selfish and help SOLVE the problem!
Yes I am selfish. But from what I see, I think I even have a better idea of what the problems are than you, and am doing a better job of helping.
Largely we could still make things cheap in the US but we'd have to rely more on technology instead of slave labor.
along with more jobs for labororers we'd also be providing more jobs for people to design, build, run, and maintain all that technology.
So what about the people who can't do all that? There are a lot of stupid and ignorant people out there. And no they aren't going to get better soon.
In those evil socialist countries, those people can collect welfare for the rest of their lives.
It's not a stretch to see that at least with some of the evil socialist countries, if technology progresses till you only have some advanced robots doing all the work, gradually everyone might collect welfare, so no problems.
But with the USA's current system of "winner takes it all* (*subject to antitrust regulations)", the path seems less clear. You might still have human "slaves", they're just not useful for labor that robots can do.
The big difference between the mass-vaccines and normal medication is:
Mass vaccine: 1) You are not sick when you get it 2) "Everyone" gets it, very high percentages of the population in some cases. 3) So some "corner case" might get affected.
Other medication/treatment: 1) You are sick when you get it 2) Only those who are sick with the appropriate disease are supposed to get it. 3) Many of the "corner cases" might have died of something else before they got to this stage, or their mutant immune system is such that they rarely get sick except from pesky vaccines;).
So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it. In contrast normal medication is more likely to make you better than worse (at least that's what those trials and studies are supposed to prove first;) ).
As a result the safety considerations of the two are not the same.
For example: say in a study or a trial of a few thousand people, only 1% had problems and treatment had to be withdrawn for them, and it worked for 25%. This would be extremely good results for a drug for liver cancer. But terrible for a mass vaccine.
Another example: peanuts are generally recognized as safe, but if you forced all children to consume peanuts as part of a mass health program, even just once, there would certainly be problems and even fatalities.
So while I do think much of the noise about vaccines is much like that "WiFi is giving me/my children" problems, it's ridiculous to say it's so safe.
It certainly can't be 100% safe, and using the safety standards of "normal medicine/treatment" may not be good enough. You'd have to apply the percentage of potential adverse reactions and fatalities, to millions of people who weren't sick in the first place, then ask, is it worth it?
And it's not just the active ingredient of the vaccine. How about the preservatives and other components of the "productized" vaccine? People can claim thimerosal is safe, but I'm not personally confident that giving it to millions wouldn't cause problems with a few hundreds - there are all sorts of people out there. Many metabolize/"flush" things differently.
So a tiny percentage of the sales are for the PC version? Perhaps people really didn't like the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 - I heard some complaints about it by PC gamers. Or perhaps PC gaming is going a different direction.
1.5 million units is a lot more than 60K. I don't think this indie game is targeted at console gamers.
But yeah maybe a bunch bought thousands of copies of this indie game with accounts/credit card numbers not belonging to them. So I'm curious to see which happened:).
Yes, the US is the most powerful nation out there, so the rest of the world cares more about what mischief the US does than what Denmark does (except maybe the Danes themselves).
Well if the 600K is legit, I'd say the complaints about piracy causing creators to starve might be overblown:).
If only there was a better practical way to pay people for stuff, I too prefer to avoid Paypal but I had to use it to pay for World of Goo (which I haven't actually played for a while since;) ). The more convenient and cheaper (in terms of overheads/fees/charges) you make it, the more likely people will pay you.
The problem would supposedly be money laundering and the politicians would make noise about "making it easy for terrorists to transfer money".
Which would be bullshit, since you'd want terrorists (and criminals) to use something easy like this, so that you can tell the company doing them "Let us install some equipment at your datacenters, OR ELSE...". Rather than a "someone" asking Abdul in UK to ask his cousin Ajani in Afghanistan to pay USD1000 to another "someone".
p.s. I wonder who the real crooks, thieves and dangerous people are: if the Federal Reserve can loan out trillions (USD 9 trillion?) without being held accountable, and you have investment bankers getting away with "keep passing crap, inflate the value of the crap, sell it, take a cut, and get a bailout when it blows",
You'll never see actual wireless, longer range, power until we discover some way of getting around that pesky inverse square law thing.
Uh you can focus the power and direct it.
The real problems I see with longer range wireless power are:
1) Safety (and perceptions of safety). 2) Your neighbours might start using your power, maybe even accidentally. So your bill goes up. 3) Doing it efficiently enough 4) Cost (to do 1, 2, 3 and other pesky details).
Yes in theory you could have multiple phased array antennas in various part of the room, and something to track your devices (maybe each device sends out a weak signal, or a clever computer with sensors/cameras tracks them), and so those phased arrays blast power at each device, maybe together, so only the focal point has a high power density.
And if you're holding a device that requires lots of power, there could still be safety issues. You could do that resonance/tuning thing, but then how big will your device and power collector be?
Simply because widespread atheism is a pretty new phenomenon
Isn't that at minimum claiming that the default for a sentient mind is theism, and sentient animals millions of years ago were theists? That would be an interesting claim, even more so coming from an atheist;).
Or would it be agnosticism, but that would also be interesting since it would first require a concept of God to be "agnostic" about.
FWIW that's why I said "resurgence of atheism" in an earlier post:). Of course I could be wrong, and dogs, apes, dolphins etc actually tend to be theists.
I'm not sure that you can infer that it gives evidence that any particular religion is better than atheism
I wasn't and am not saying any religion is better than atheism. Those religions which had regular human sacrifices, and other crappy ones certainly were far worse (good thing they have mostly died out:) ).
I was saying that since the placebo effect exists and is real, so it is reasonable to suggest that in theory a religion could let believers more easily take advantage of it, and if this theoretical religion did not have significant drawbacks, groups following it would be fitter than groups not having a religion at all (all else being equal). A costly but war-happy religion might still be fitter, just because it wipes out all the others - but we wouldn't want to cultivate such religions right?
FWIW, I just came back from a funeral, and sure seems like religion can help many people deal with loss and grief better, and an economist might be happy if such people can sooner return to being productive members of society. Of course I'm claiming this without any proof. It might make for an interesting study - see how well people of different belief systems recover (atheists, muslims, christians, buddhists, taoists, hindus, sikhs etc), but it might take a rather brave (or oblivious) researcher to do it...
Saying "yes, he's definitely gone forever" is normally not helpful to the bereaved.
So even if I was an atheist, I would still think that at least some religions are good to have around even if I didn't believe in them.
<quote>Just because believing something provides benefits, it doesn't mean it is actually true!</quote> Sure, but I was arguing that: 1) The placebo effect is real (lots of scientific research shows it exists). There are limitations to it, but it works. 2) So even if God does not exist, a person who is able to pray to God and get pain relief or other stuff (for which placebos do work) has an advantage over someone who can't. Even if this advantage is slight, a large group of such individuals would be evolutionarily fitter in the long term than a large group who can't, assuming everything else is equal.
<quote>It is the absence of religion, it is not meant to achieve anything</quote>
I know that, but if religion does provide benefits and the absence of religion does not, then all else being equal, from a evolutionary perspective it is better to have religion than not.
Some religions do cost more (e.g. human sacrifices), and some may do better just because they are more effective at eliminating the others.
I think Atheists tend to cherry pick too (everybody does). So many focus on the harm religions do, and they think all religions are the cause of most of the evils when that's not true.
Mao, Stalin and their like sure managed to kill and give people excuses to kill. UK football fans travel across borders to beat up other people, and not because of religion ( Of course if you view football/Maoism/Communism as a religion then almost anything can be a religion and it becomes more of which religions should you encourage and which should you discourage).
Sure religions do cause harm, and do cost their adherents something, but at least some do benefit their adherents or even nonadherents and society overall.
For example: there is plenty of evidence that the placebo effect is real and works for many useful scenarios. Thus if you believe that an all-present omniscient God can help you, you can still more easily tap into the placebo effect by praying (even if turns out God doesn't exist), than a strict Atheist who totally does not believe - who certainly isn't going to ask His Noodleness for help (by strict Atheists won't be praying to anything).
So it then becomes a matter of how much the religion costs vs easier placebo tapping and other benefits of the religion (many top hospitals and schools were set up by the religious, it does cost them, but the benefit to society has endured past their individual death). If there is even a slight net benefit compared to the others or not believing, then multiplied by millions of people over many generations, you will have a belief system that is "evolutionarily fitter" than the others on a group basis.
Not all religions are the same. I suggest that some would provide a net benefit.
In contrast what greater net benefit would Atheism provide to atheists or society as a whole? Religious scientists were and are perfectly capable of rational thinking. Galileo himself was a Roman Catholic.
Are atheists living longer and more fulfilling lives than the religious of similar educational and economic backgrounds?
Many of the major religions have outcompeted and outevolved other belief systems over centuries or even millenia. Assuming that most other animals do not believe in God, then religion has certainly appeared after atheism and done quite well against it for the past thousands of years. I doubt this recent resurgence of atheism will lead to atheism beating religion.
And even if it does, would the world really be better for it? After all, most people seem to have a need to be part of something greater, and to revere/worship something. Whether it is a football team, or "Super Veganism". Would the resulting vacuum be filled much better by whatever replaces "Religion"? I'd think you'd still end up getting religion. After all just look at the Communist countries in the early days or North Korea - the leaders become objects of worship.
As for the the prohibition on homosexual acts (is there really a prohibition against homosexuality?), according to Christianity, it is also wrong for a man to look lustfully and adulterously at a woman. And adultery is certainly a sin. Premarital sex is wrong too. So if heterosexuals or homosexuals cannot get married no sex for them, but hey many slashdotters aren't going to get married or have sex anyway and still manage right?;). And once they get married they are also supposed to be faithful to their partners for life. I'm not married but judging from the grumbles I'd say some of the married men aren't getting that much more sex;). So it's hard but I don't see it has that much harder. It might even be easier situation than the people who marry, have kids and have marital problems.
What should Christians do about sinners (of whatever orientation)? To me, Christians should stick to doing the fruits of the spirit stuff, and leave the punishing and judging of nonbelievers to God. So far I only see stuff in the bible for Christians to admonish fellow believer
Slashdot Mirror
What is the point of memorizing information when you can look it up in a book?
Q) What's the point of having 1st, 2nd and 3rd level caches, and DRAM when you can swap to and from a 1TB disk?
A) Latency.
That said, there is no point memorizing/caching useless information, or information which is not involved in much synthesis or processing, or information for tasks which tolerate high latencies.
So memorization is still useful and will always be useful. Of course if they ever start making better neural interfaces, we can artificially enhance our memories with fairly low latencies.
Basically you could associate brain patterns/sequences (thought-macros) with objects and tasks. So just thinking of someone (followed by a "start command sequence", "quick-recall-end"[1]) would get your e-brain to recall whatever it has on that someone (which you saved by associating the objects - videos, pics, text, structured data, with the thought pattern you get when you think of that person).
Of course, in a DRM infested world there would likely be many artificial limits and parasitic costs associated with such devices. These would be the cost of copyright laws. Humans would be more crippled than they would be otherwise.
Then the title would be "how bad laws make us stupid" ;).
[1] The "quick-recall-end" thought macro saves you time - you don't have to think of the "end command sequence" thought pattern (which would be required for more complicated/intensive stuff).
Uh, she just did.
GP's point is that waste is only something to worry about when you also have scarcity.
Waste can still be a problem if there is totally no scarcity, since waste heat will become an issue if everyone can use as much energy as they want. The Earth may even start glowing red/white hot (everyone would be having heat pumps etc, facing out to space) :). While you certainly could still live under such conditions (lots of energy to throw at the problem), it would be a rather ugly situation.
As for "standby waste" power, the "stand by" power draw of the modern "energy star" stuff is already tiny enough to put it at the bottom of the "need to use less energy" list.
These devices use 1 watt or less when on stand by. 1 watt for 24 hours is 86400 joules.
1 litre of petrol is 34 megajoules. Making unnecessary trips or taking the wrong route will use up more energy. One double cheese burger gives you 2 megajoules. The amount of energy to produce a double cheese burger is probably more than 2 megajoules.
It takes 4186 joules to raise about 1 litre of water one degree C. Assuming the water is 25 degrees C, it would take about 314000 joules to boil water at sea level.
So basically wasting resources just to cut standby power further makes little sense (unless it is trivial and very cheap to do so) and is more of a "feel good" thing. It's better to focus on cutting energy on other far more energy intensive stuff - heating, airconditioning, dryers, washing machines in "warm/hot wash", long commutes, ovens.
I wonder if it makes sense to have domestic ovens with better insulation (e.g. aerogels) - so perhaps you could retain and reuse the heat from the previous day's baking/roast, whether by keeping it in place or by transferring the heat to store it and transferring it back when needed.
but 15 cm isn't that far either, it's probably not going to replace all cords anytime soon.
There'd be a limit to distance (and power output), otherwise more people would be getting free power from their neighbours whether intentionally or not.
And people would be complaining that the stuff is making them ill, filing lawsuits etc.
Most of Acid3 is mainstream web standards. Yes, some of it is esoteric, but mostly it's basic features that have been standards for many years. This includes CSS2, JavaScript, DOM, and SVG.
OK and which of those "mainstream web standards" are the browsers failing?
IE, firefox etc seem to be scoring about 95% on the acid3 test. So does that mean that:
a) The browsers are actually good enough nowadays (they weren't before when they were scoring lower).
b) The acid3 test is useless - the browsers are scoring high because acid3 doesn't test enough important mainstream bits that the browsers are failing.
Can't remember that, because normally when I hear "Gartner", I think "Bullshit". But that's my personal bias, so I was just wondering if my bias is unfounded :).
For my tiny country of 20+ million people, if our political leaders ever _starts_ a war against another country, it could actually be patriotic to kill those leaders.
Yes, depending on the border we could have more oil/fish or less. But many rich countries don't have that much in terms of natural resources.
In fact in many countries that have lots of oil or other natural resource, the leaders don't need the people, and so don't care at all - they just split the wealth between some foreigners and themselves.
If they can 'see it' so can the enemy.
Not if the screens actually only appear in your mind. They are making some progress, not sure if they'll succeed that soon or at all in producing hires displays that you can see in your "mind's eye".
How useful are Gartner anyway? What's their track record like for useful accurate predictions. Where useful = nonobvious.
I didn't want to part with it, I liked to have ALL my teeth. I guess now I appreciate those molars even more!
Oh, and I DID ask for that tooth back. It's in my bathroom now haha.
So you do still have all your teeth? :)
Hmmm, maybe I should start keeping my hair before I start balding...
Well Starcraft 2 certainly seems to be doing better. And yes it can be pirated.
Just googling seems to show there was quite some bad feeling about MW2 in the PC gamer community:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/11/pc-modern-warfare-2-its-much-worse-than-you-thought.ars
http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4069/mw2b.jpg
FWIW I've played none of the mentioned games.
I'm not against mass vaccines.
I'm against vaccines where:
Mortality rate of vaccine * number of vaccinated > mortality rate of disease * number of infected.
or:
Adverse effect rate * number of a vaccinated > adverse effect rate of disease * number of infected.
Vaccines do cause fatalities: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3336455/Secret-report-reveals-18-child-deaths-following-vaccinations.html
(probably not all those deaths were from the vaccine)
And it is possible to have a scenario where mass vaccination could do more harm than the disease even if the disease has a high mortality rate.
For example, say you had an Ebola vaccine that killed 1/5000 of those vaccinated. And that Ebola killed 90% of those infected.
You should still not mass vaccinate _everyone_ with that Ebola vaccine, because Ebola doesn't spread that well.
(FWIW, I don't think the real Ebola vaccine currently in trials is that dangerous)
Basically mass vaccinations are self-inflicted "pandemics". If these resulting vaccine "pandemics" are worse than the disease (assuming the usual nonvaccine countermeasures like quarantine, restrictions on travel, and limited vaccination to just groups at risk), then mass vaccinations are not justified.
I'm not saying all of these mass vaccinations are unjustified.
It just annoys me when people say stuff like "the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering."
3-4 years of protection after 6 years "pending" in the patent office.
I think the supposed benefits are not worth the already visible costs to society.
Companies are just using them as anticompetitive barriers or as a way to parasite off other companies actually doing stuff.
Ideas really are a dime a dozen. I can think of lots of ideas.
OK I phrased that incorrectly. I meant that in the vaccine case you are already healthy[1], so the vaccine can't make you better. It can only make you worse.
But my other points still stand. Mass vaccinations are self inflicted pandemics. Thus they must be much safer compared to the disease, assuming countermeasures such as quarantine.
[1] For most of the mass vaccines I know of, it's recommended to wait till you are healthy before you take the vaccine.
First of all, the number of people who get sick from a vaccine even closely to the degree they would have with the disease it is so unbelievably small it's not even worth considering.
Citation please? What's your level of "unbelievably small" and "not worth even considering"?
Second of all, you are completely ignoring the social side of this.
Yes I am, because I was talking about a different issue. Maybe your reply should be to a different post?
I was assuming most readers on slashdot (nerd land) already know the social benefits of vaccines.
I'm talking about the costs. To me it seems a lot of people still don't understand the costs and safety issues. They aren't like normal medication/treatment.
1 person out of 5000 getting sick from a vaccine (generously bad number) is nothing compared to what happens when people don't get vaccinated and the disease hits everyone.
Bullshit.
1/5000 getting sick from normal medication is a pretty good statistic. Because as I said in my post, not everyone will be getting it, and only the few who are sick.
1/5000 getting sick from a mass vaccine is pretty bad when you're dealing with millions or even billions of people.
The 2009 flu pandemic only killed 18000 people, and the WHO made a big fuss about it. Whereas if you gave a flu vaccine to 6 billion people that killed 1 in 5000, there would be 1.2 million dead because of the crappy vaccine.
A mass administered flu vaccine must not kill more than 1 in 333333 people to be not as bad as this flu.
And the low H1N1 fatalities weren't mainly because of the vaccine (since most people didn't take it). I didn't get the H1N1 flu (or if I did, it wasn't really bad to me), I didn't get the vaccine either, but my colleague sitting next to me got the flu (I suspect her hamsters died of it too :( ). So a mass flu vaccine better be really safe, or the flu strain better be really dangerous. Otherwise we'd just resort to quarantines.
These mass vaccines are basically self inflicted pandemics, so the fatalities and adverse effects must be MUCH lower than the expected real world fatalities in their absence. Not just slightly lower, MUCH lower. Because they cost resources.
Also, typically in order to get the vaccine, people need to go to places with lots of infectious people, or be in contact with someone who has recently been in contact with thousands of potentially infectious people. Slashdot dweller in basement is pretty safe till he goes out to get the vaccine.
Despite your claims, a lot of these diseases won't hit everyone just because some people don't get vaccinated.
So to me this "vaccines are really safe" thinking that you share is just as dangerous as the hysterical cries that "vaccines made my kid a retard".
For example the HPV vaccine. Requiring mass HPV vaccination would just benefit the corporations making the vaccines (and yes there are calls for it to be mass administered). But not everyone will get HPV, and not everyone will have problems resulting from it.
So stop being selfish and help SOLVE the problem!
Yes I am selfish. But from what I see, I think I even have a better idea of what the problems are than you, and am doing a better job of helping.
Largely we could still make things cheap in the US but we'd have to rely more on technology instead of slave labor.
along with more jobs for labororers we'd also be providing more jobs for people to design, build, run, and maintain all that technology.
So what about the people who can't do all that? There are a lot of stupid and ignorant people out there. And no they aren't going to get better soon.
In those evil socialist countries, those people can collect welfare for the rest of their lives.
It's not a stretch to see that at least with some of the evil socialist countries, if technology progresses till you only have some advanced robots doing all the work, gradually everyone might collect welfare, so no problems.
But with the USA's current system of "winner takes it all* (*subject to antitrust regulations)", the path seems less clear. You might still have human "slaves", they're just not useful for labor that robots can do.
The big difference between the mass-vaccines and normal medication is:
;).
;) ).
Mass vaccine:
1) You are not sick when you get it
2) "Everyone" gets it, very high percentages of the population in some cases.
3) So some "corner case" might get affected.
Other medication/treatment:
1) You are sick when you get it
2) Only those who are sick with the appropriate disease are supposed to get it.
3) Many of the "corner cases" might have died of something else before they got to this stage, or their mutant immune system is such that they rarely get sick except from pesky vaccines
So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it. In contrast normal medication is more likely to make you better than worse (at least that's what those trials and studies are supposed to prove first
As a result the safety considerations of the two are not the same.
For example: say in a study or a trial of a few thousand people, only 1% had problems and treatment had to be withdrawn for them, and it worked for 25%. This would be extremely good results for a drug for liver cancer. But terrible for a mass vaccine.
Another example: peanuts are generally recognized as safe, but if you forced all children to consume peanuts as part of a mass health program, even just once, there would certainly be problems and even fatalities.
So while I do think much of the noise about vaccines is much like that "WiFi is giving me/my children" problems, it's ridiculous to say it's so safe.
It certainly can't be 100% safe, and using the safety standards of "normal medicine/treatment" may not be good enough. You'd have to apply the percentage of potential adverse reactions and fatalities, to millions of people who weren't sick in the first place, then ask, is it worth it?
And it's not just the active ingredient of the vaccine. How about the preservatives and other components of the "productized" vaccine? People can claim thimerosal is safe, but I'm not personally confident that giving it to millions wouldn't cause problems with a few hundreds - there are all sorts of people out there. Many metabolize/"flush" things differently.
By the way 60K preorders, for comparison, is about 1/4th the total sales of Modern Warfare 2 on the PC
Not saying you're wrong but do you have a cite for that? I'm curious on the figures.
The console versions had at least 2.2 million preorders in the USA: http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/5514/americas-preorder-charts-11th-oct-09/
With 10 million units sold in 12 days: http://gamrfeed.vgchartz.com/story/5953/modern-warfare-2-hits-10-million-units-sold/
So a tiny percentage of the sales are for the PC version? Perhaps people really didn't like the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 - I heard some complaints about it by PC gamers. Or perhaps PC gaming is going a different direction.
Because Starcraft 2 had 1.5 million copies sold in 48 hours. And I don't think there's a console version of that yet. http://www.pcworld.com/article/202460/starcraft_ii_sales_top_15_million_copies_in_48_hours.html
1.5 million units is a lot more than 60K. I don't think this indie game is targeted at console gamers.
But yeah maybe a bunch bought thousands of copies of this indie game with accounts/credit card numbers not belonging to them. So I'm curious to see which happened :).
Yes, the US is the most powerful nation out there, so the rest of the world cares more about what mischief the US does than what Denmark does (except maybe the Danes themselves).
Oh yah the other problem would be malware, hackers and phishers stealing money more easily.
Oh well...
Well if the 600K is legit, I'd say the complaints about piracy causing creators to starve might be overblown :).
;) ). The more convenient and cheaper (in terms of overheads/fees/charges) you make it, the more likely people will pay you.
If only there was a better practical way to pay people for stuff, I too prefer to avoid Paypal but I had to use it to pay for World of Goo (which I haven't actually played for a while since
The problem would supposedly be money laundering and the politicians would make noise about "making it easy for terrorists to transfer money".
Which would be bullshit, since you'd want terrorists (and criminals) to use something easy like this, so that you can tell the company doing them "Let us install some equipment at your datacenters, OR ELSE...". Rather than a "someone" asking Abdul in UK to ask his cousin Ajani in Afghanistan to pay USD1000 to another "someone".
p.s. I wonder who the real crooks, thieves and dangerous people are: if the Federal Reserve can loan out trillions (USD 9 trillion?) without being held accountable, and you have investment bankers getting away with "keep passing crap, inflate the value of the crap, sell it, take a cut, and get a bailout when it blows",
You'll never see actual wireless, longer range, power until we discover some way of getting around that pesky inverse square law thing.
Uh you can focus the power and direct it.
The real problems I see with longer range wireless power are:
1) Safety (and perceptions of safety).
2) Your neighbours might start using your power, maybe even accidentally. So your bill goes up.
3) Doing it efficiently enough
4) Cost (to do 1, 2, 3 and other pesky details).
Yes in theory you could have multiple phased array antennas in various part of the room, and something to track your devices (maybe each device sends out a weak signal, or a clever computer with sensors/cameras tracks them), and so those phased arrays blast power at each device, maybe together, so only the focal point has a high power density.
And if you're holding a device that requires lots of power, there could still be safety issues. You could do that resonance/tuning thing, but then how big will your device and power collector be?
Simply because widespread atheism is a pretty new phenomenon
Isn't that at minimum claiming that the default for a sentient mind is theism, and sentient animals millions of years ago were theists? That would be an interesting claim, even more so coming from an atheist ;).
Or would it be agnosticism, but that would also be interesting since it would first require a concept of God to be "agnostic" about.
FWIW that's why I said "resurgence of atheism" in an earlier post :). Of course I could be wrong, and dogs, apes, dolphins etc actually tend to be theists.
I'm not sure that you can infer that it gives evidence that any particular religion is better than atheism
I wasn't and am not saying any religion is better than atheism. Those religions which had regular human sacrifices, and other crappy ones certainly were far worse (good thing they have mostly died out :) ).
I was saying that since the placebo effect exists and is real, so it is reasonable to suggest that in theory a religion could let believers more easily take advantage of it, and if this theoretical religion did not have significant drawbacks, groups following it would be fitter than groups not having a religion at all (all else being equal). A costly but war-happy religion might still be fitter, just because it wipes out all the others - but we wouldn't want to cultivate such religions right?
FWIW, I just came back from a funeral, and sure seems like religion can help many people deal with loss and grief better, and an economist might be happy if such people can sooner return to being productive members of society. Of course I'm claiming this without any proof. It might make for an interesting study - see how well people of different belief systems recover (atheists, muslims, christians, buddhists, taoists, hindus, sikhs etc), but it might take a rather brave (or oblivious) researcher to do it...
Saying "yes, he's definitely gone forever" is normally not helpful to the bereaved.
So even if I was an atheist, I would still think that at least some religions are good to have around even if I didn't believe in them.
Thanks for your response :)
<quote>Just because believing something provides benefits, it doesn't mean it is actually true!</quote>
Sure, but I was arguing that:
1) The placebo effect is real (lots of scientific research shows it exists). There are limitations to it, but it works.
2) So even if God does not exist, a person who is able to pray to God and get pain relief or other stuff (for which placebos do work) has an advantage over someone who can't. Even if this advantage is slight, a large group of such individuals would be evolutionarily fitter in the long term than a large group who can't, assuming everything else is equal.
<quote>It is the absence of religion, it is not meant to achieve anything</quote>
I know that, but if religion does provide benefits and the absence of religion does not, then all else being equal, from a evolutionary perspective it is better to have religion than not.
Some religions do cost more (e.g. human sacrifices), and some may do better just because they are more effective at eliminating the others.
So not all religions are a net benefit.
I think Atheists tend to cherry pick too (everybody does). So many focus on the harm religions do, and they think all religions are the cause of most of the evils when that's not true.
;). And once they get married they are also supposed to be faithful to their partners for life. I'm not married but judging from the grumbles I'd say some of the married men aren't getting that much more sex ;). So it's hard but I don't see it has that much harder. It might even be easier situation than the people who marry, have kids and have marital problems.
Mao, Stalin and their like sure managed to kill and give people excuses to kill. UK football fans travel across borders to beat up other people, and not because of religion ( Of course if you view football/Maoism/Communism as a religion then almost anything can be a religion and it becomes more of which religions should you encourage and which should you discourage).
Sure religions do cause harm, and do cost their adherents something, but at least some do benefit their adherents or even nonadherents and society overall.
For example: there is plenty of evidence that the placebo effect is real and works for many useful scenarios. Thus if you believe that an all-present omniscient God can help you, you can still more easily tap into the placebo effect by praying (even if turns out God doesn't exist), than a strict Atheist who totally does not believe - who certainly isn't going to ask His Noodleness for help (by strict Atheists won't be praying to anything).
So it then becomes a matter of how much the religion costs vs easier placebo tapping and other benefits of the religion (many top hospitals and schools were set up by the religious, it does cost them, but the benefit to society has endured past their individual death). If there is even a slight net benefit compared to the others or not believing, then multiplied by millions of people over many generations, you will have a belief system that is "evolutionarily fitter" than the others on a group basis.
Not all religions are the same. I suggest that some would provide a net benefit.
In contrast what greater net benefit would Atheism provide to atheists or society as a whole? Religious scientists were and are perfectly capable of rational thinking. Galileo himself was a Roman Catholic.
Are atheists living longer and more fulfilling lives than the religious of similar educational and economic backgrounds?
Many of the major religions have outcompeted and outevolved other belief systems over centuries or even millenia. Assuming that most other animals do not believe in God, then religion has certainly appeared after atheism and done quite well against it for the past thousands of years. I doubt this recent resurgence of atheism will lead to atheism beating religion.
And even if it does, would the world really be better for it? After all, most people seem to have a need to be part of something greater, and to revere/worship something. Whether it is a football team, or "Super Veganism". Would the resulting vacuum be filled much better by whatever replaces "Religion"? I'd think you'd still end up getting religion. After all just look at the Communist countries in the early days or North Korea - the leaders become objects of worship.
As for the the prohibition on homosexual acts (is there really a prohibition against homosexuality?), according to Christianity, it is also wrong for a man to look lustfully and adulterously at a woman. And adultery is certainly a sin. Premarital sex is wrong too. So if heterosexuals or homosexuals cannot get married no sex for them, but hey many slashdotters aren't going to get married or have sex anyway and still manage right?
What should Christians do about sinners (of whatever orientation)? To me, Christians should stick to doing the fruits of the spirit stuff, and leave the punishing and judging of nonbelievers to God. So far I only see stuff in the bible for Christians to admonish fellow believer