Imagine if all the homeless and unemployed had a fixed amount of income. Maybe $500-$600/mo
I worry about how much of that would simply be funneled to the casinos and liqueur marts. Maybe they are acceptable parasites. I imagine it would help some people. But some of the homeless are down'n'outers are there because they can't get their act together, and handing them money isn't going to necessarily help them do so.
Efforts to control what the money is spent on, like foodstamps, just makes a secondary market for exchanging funneymoney to real cash.
What? If that was true, then there really wouldn't be any problems when factories had massive layoffs. And when they do eventually find work elsewhere, the extra competition drives down wages.
Universal vocational education--that is, college education--touted as a solution, is an exacerbating problem:
Except that there is work for people with real skills. Tech schools, trade schools, STEM degrees, and less so with philosophy or anthropology. We live in a different sort of soceity than the 70's. We don't need as much unskilled labor.
while a universal income always pays at 100%, and is thus immune to the fluctuations of economy.
Well.... I highly doubt that it wouldn't be a contentious issue and be tweaked up and down on a regular basis at the whims of the politicians and the voting blocs.
Sorry for the length, but it's hard not to go piece by piece when everything is just so wrong. And you know we can't have people being wrong on the Internet.
you believe that a 'court ruling' has to do with truth?
Sure, it's not iron-clad, but there's a strong correlation with the truth. And they lost the appeal too. And typically when there are questionable legal shindigs, you don't have the uppity-ups double-down and lay their reputation on the line with such hard language like:
"This case, however, is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
They pussyfoot around the call for plausible deniability.
i sincerely have no animosity toward you (even though you are apparently now my first 'foe' . i hope you are at least enjoying the humor in this exchange).
joking aside though
I find it useful to keep track of the crazies. And this exchange hasn't been humorous. I've tried to give the anti-vaccers a legitimate chance to convince me that there was something to their argument and you've failed to present anything other than vague fear-mongering and the name of a bullshit documentary.
i understand why this is hard to see, and why i no doubt seem to you like an a-hole crackpot. it's ok
No, it's really not. This is a debate in an open forum. If you just accept that you look like an asshole crackpot and lack the ability or facts or reason to justify your position, then trying to participate in the conversation actively damages your sides claim. You're both stirring up controversy, and then damning your own side of the argument by failing to deliver.
but these are larger issues about information control and a fundamentally deceptive process.
Uh huh, "it's a conspiracy"? Is that what you want to say? "We can't trust any information we find out there and the whole system is decieving us. All the doctors and scientists must be in on it." If this isn't the groundwork for some epic baseless fear-mongering I don't know what is.
Listen, there probably is a conspiracy of some sort. All it takes is two guys with a plan they don't tell anyone. That's a conspiracy. And I'm positive that the pharmaceutical companies are getting paid WAY too much money. And a sizeable chunk of that is probably straight up corruption. But I don't think that they're poisoning kids with vaccines just to make a buck.
and im not going to convince you absent a "manifesto",
I was really looking more for examples of what these "big changes with dirty fingerprints" are, what the dangers of vaccines are, and what exactly you're trying to raise awareness of. Something concrete that would either be refutable, or give your argument some legs to stand on.
ive said my peace.
Geeze, are you 12? Come on, "I've said my piece". It's not that hard. You're doing this from a phone aren't you.... If this was your piece, then you've got nothing except shadows and boogieman.
pft, hey, you should be a pastafarian. There's a book out there about it. Start there. After you've read it, you can come back to talk to me. Until then, imagine this whole thread was me trying to convert you to the religion and failing because I didn't actually say anything about it. loveysnugglepuppies, heckruler
But oh hey, SURE, let's go that extra mile to show you how you're wrong.
The Greater Good is a documentary film about the risks vs. benefits of vaccines...
The three anecdotes around which the film is based on are those of:
Gabi Swank of Wichita, Kansas, who received an HPV vaccine and attributes a number of adverse reactions, including a seizure, to this experience, Jordan King of Portland, Oregon, who regressed into autism following routine vaccination, and was one of the test cases for the autism omnibus proceedings and whose case was rejected by the Special Master, and Victoria Grace Boyd Christener of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who died at the age of 5 months after receiving a vaccine.
Oh my god, it's an emotional gut-wrencher fluff piece about three specific individuals. First off, Gabi Swank's case derives from their Neurologist Dr. Lindholm claiming that her condition was caused by the vaccine. Hey, if he's got evidence that links the two, all the more power to him and getting that sort of thing published and the vaccine pulled. Shit happens yo, and we need to fix it. If it's real. But I can't find anything he's published about this. All I can find is a single quote and it's dropped like fart in the wind. Was this one stray comment from a doctor that the family picked up and ran with? Hey, the need to blame someone is strong. I get it. But choose your target with care.
Let's look at Jordan King of Portland and the autism omnibus proceedings:
On February 12, 2009, the court ruled in three test cases that the combination of the MMR vaccine and thiomersal-containing vaccines were not to blame for autism. Hastings concluded in his decision, "Unfortunately, the Cedillos have been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment."[17] The ruling was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals,[18] and upheld.
"This case, however, is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
And an infant died, which sucks. We've come a long way in lowering the infant mortality rate. There's still the edge cases.
You're working REALLY HARD at NOT pointing out anything. If it's hiding in plain sight, I imagine it'd be pretty easy to point out.
Yes, there's the possibility that you're just trolling for shits'n'giggles, but that's unlikely. There's the chance that you're literally paid to promote this sort of drama by... geeze, I don't even know. That's even less likely. I think you're most likely deluded and have been sucked in by propaganda and have a natural inclination to look for the scam. The exact sort of thing you're rallying against.
Now, commentators like Vermonter, operagost, and photon317 are arguing against this idea because it sets a bad precedence for government control, while they recognize that vaccines are important and good. You should really take a second look at the way they're presenting their point. You, on the other hand, seem to straddle the fence on the benefit of vaccines in general.
But come on, you're ranting about how people need to be informed, I'm asking you to inform me, and then you complain about having to "spoonfeed"? Even if you're not a troll, you're certainly not worth listening to, because you're not saying anything. Imagine you had to routinely pass by this group of really annoying people that had a bad reputation. One of them runs up to you "HEY, LISTEN TO ME!" And you uncharacteristically stop, turn to them, and replay "Yeah, what do you want?" And then they run off saying "LOL, not a troll. Best regards"
there are BIG changes that have dirty fingerprints all over them.
Please state them. What are these changes? What are the dirty fingerprints?
the more you learn about the FDA, USDA, big pharmaceutical companies, and their legal exemptions from prosecution, the money's involved.. etc, the more you realize how obvious it is that there are real dangers and risks being passed along to the unwitting public in the interests of $.
Please state, explicitly, what those dangers are.
awareness needs to be raised
OF WHAT? So far you're throwing around vague fearmongering. Come on, do the work, put in the effort, reasearch it a bit, cite those sources, and present your argument.
I have very little trust in bigPharma, and like most megacorps, they're probably swindling the masses for all they can. But just because, say, ConAgra is getting Tax breaks doesn't mean that corn is poison or we should stop eating food.
Doesn't matter. Law enforcement can get that data with (orwithout) a warrant. Likewise, this data is more or less publicly available if there are ever any security breaches. And we all know that someone like FitBit would pay the utmost attention to critical information like.... how often you giggled your wrist. Not that my home computer would be all that much secure. But it makes it a far less juicy target if there's just the one guy.
And those HIPPA laws only ever come into affect if you're cognizant of someone handing out your information. If someone out there simply knows all your details, you can't sue them, as they could have gotten it from anywhere. The problem with a retaliatory legal system is that if your rights get violated in secret and the effects linger or cause legal effects, then you're boned because you can't prove it happened. Not that I know anything better. But I don't have faith in the legal system to protect me from the legal system or people in the shadows.
Relax, I'm really not offended. I find your schoolyard level whining to be, at most, adorable.
But that doesn't mean it's not a death threat: "Someone should probably be beheaded. Someone like you." See that? You're suggesting I should have my head cut off. But no, it's obviously not serious and obviously you're impotent in this regard so I really don't feel threatened. It's only a small step above "hey you, go DIAF".
Now.... in case you actually hang around... think about what you're doing here. You're posing a message that you believe would endanger your job. The term "fire-able offense" comes to mind. Is that the sort of grassroots defense that the would help absolve the CIA of their international crime? (And yes, the USA signed that covenant) Do you REALLY think that suggesting I be brutally murdered is a good way to point out the difference between torture and execution?
Oh my goodness, an anonymous death-threat from someone defending CIA's torture on an online forum. That's adorable. I feel like I must be doing something right.
You know I always thought that the group of people that complained about death threats were overplaying it. I mean, who would actually send death-threats to someone complaining about torture? Or that lady complaining about how women are treated in video games, or the police brutality crowd. It really doesn't lend any weight to their argument. It makes them come off as... well... violent psychopaths with a REALLY bad grasp of irony. The exact sort of stereotype that they're being accused of being.
It's the sort of thing that makes me suspicious of some sort of casual agent provocateur. Or "trolling" if you prefer the newer term. But once you start with those sort of questions you might as well be jumping at shadows.
Damn shame he's a coward though. I'd like to hear how he thought that'd be a helpful comment.
Certain detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), which the Department of Justice determined at the time to be lawful and which were duly authorized by the Bush Administration. These techniques, which were last used by the CIA in December 2007, subsequently were prohibited by an Executive Order issued by President Obama when he took office in January 2009.
Damn straight that guy deserves a medal. Wish he had kept up that sort of perspective.
CIA officers are rightly proud and honored to be part of an organization that is indispensable to our national security.
The featured article implies that Fitbit is in fact being used as a black box, despite not originally having been intended so.
No it didn't. The lawyer looked at historical data of the trainer's fitbit device. It was not the last remaining record of a airliners's demise. Nor was the wearer of the fitbit... you know.... killed.
Here we go, from another news article:
The data will be provided by the plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit in an effort to show life-affecting reduced activity post injury
Which could honestly just be the trainer not wearing the bracelet as often.
That works for the Fitbit's original intended use but not for the black box use described in the featured article.
Also, I want to point out here that the data from these devices are being used not as originally intended. Hey, it was useful for the client this time. Maybe. But you're argument here is pointing out that your data can be used to show all sorts of things. That's typically something I'd use to point out how bad of an idea it is to have a third party hold onto all this data.
Anyway, regardless of all that, it doesn't matter, someone could actually want some sort of device to act like a blackbox. Like if they were recording cops at checkpoints. I would still want that data backed up to my own computer rather than trusting "the cloud". Most specifically if I had a concern that the police might try and confiscate/lose my phone and it's recorded data.
Over the Internet? Can you seriously not connect to your computer over the Internet?
Not if your computer's Internet connection doesn't allow incoming connections, whether because of CGNAT applied by your home ISP, because of a "no servers" clause in your home ISP's terms of service,
Wow, that sucks balls. Yeah, no, if we're talking about the merits of software architectures, and which way we'd prefer things to operate, I'm going to go ahead and announce that I wouldn't purchase that service. Ever. If I got such a service, and I found I couldn't run a minecraft server, or ssh into my box, or hell, does skype work with that? Yeah, no, if I found out that's what I'd bought, I'd promptly drop it and go get something that, you know, functions.
or because it is in suspend mode to save electric power.
You want objects in C? DONE. You want simple inheritance? Here you go:
struct father {
struct father* next; };
struct son {
struct father inheritance;
char* yobro; };
But if you want a thing that contains data structures, code, and interfaces like an object in C++... that's just a.c and.h file.
Inheriting and expanding that code base in a real object oriented way is going to involve some crazy shenanigans with a lot of function pointers like you see in the GTK. It's just not simple and clean in C.
No, C is not going to get objects. If you gave it objects, that would be a fork, and many many other people have tried that. Some of them did a decent job.
C is going to be in the future. But it's not going to compete with Java, C#, or C++. And certainly not with whatever crazy web-dev language of the week they have.
NO! My precious fitbit data! No one must know about my secret midnight workouts!
Ok, I know this is a low-grade troll, but hey, this is the sort of argument rummaging around in the back of laypeople's heads. Lemme tackle this one head on.
This boils down to ol' classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument, implying that anyone that is hiding anything, or advocates privacy in any way is up to no good. The broad scope of this argument has all sorts of come-backs: the right to privacy itself, unintended details becoming public (I was only half-joking about secret midnight workouts. Do you wear this thing to bed? Are you comfortable with everyone knowing when your wife woke you up?), security and vulnerability concerns, are you gay? Do you believe the earth is 6K years old? Do you want all your co-workers to know how much money you make/spend? Anyway, there are plenty of arguments for why privacy in general is good.
Specifically though, I lamented the fact that cops can go grab corporate data. You know, in pursuit of a criminal investigation, theoretically. And if the system worked as it was supposed to, and there was no police abuse, warrant were a real requirement, and they only used to catch the bad guys, hey, I'd be ok with that. I honestly do want the cops to be able to open locks when chasing anti-social criminal fuckers. Unfortunately, the amount of trust I have in the system is waning. Now, the people with the authority to use these powers and ability to abuse these powers are really only going to make your life hard if they have cause to. It's not yet a for-profit system of abuse. NSA interns can probably still go search their girlfriends travel patterns, but meh. This is where the paranoid part come in. I'm worried about the legal system being bypassed (with warrantless wiretaps), all this data being collected as a routine measure (and stored in the NSA's Utah facility), and the current political powerhouse pressuring someone into giving them all the dirt on the opposing politician. Or some diehard Whig loyalist sending it anonymously. Or someone who hates black people and hippies. And now you have a sole political individual or party that has the power to dredge up the dirt on their opponent and run unopposed. I don't really care if some cop has the ability to look through my personal data. I'm honestly pretty vanilla and boring. But the idea that some hardliner could spy on my politician? Bad mojo right there.
Also, This is hilarious. Took me a bit to realize it was a parody site. We're approaching Poe's law when it comes to this stuff.
Hey tepples, how you doing? Slashdot mods, you get in here too.
Listen, I'm not even mad. I understand I'm not always the most eloquent and well spoken. But the idea you're suggesting here is the exact thing I was shooting down.
Yes, if you want to collect more data than will fit on the device (Gigs, we have GIGABYTES to work with), or you want backups made, or the thing is acting like a blackbox (which fitbit is not), then... and try and follow me here.... "you'd want this data on other devices." Right? It's on your phone collecting data, but you want it on a different device. Maybe the NSA's servers. Or the cloud. Or maybe you'd rather you set up a program to sync the data between your phone and your desktop. That's what I was suggesting. That people backup their phone's data onto their own personal desktops rather than uploading this data to some company's servers. I typically refer to that action as "syncing". It keeps the data in sync between two locations. And I own both. And now the storage of the device and the survivability of the device aren't as important.
To someone else, you commented:
That's exactly why I want the data to go to MY server at home.
How are you going to get it from your phone to your home server across an ISP's NAT?
Over the Internet? Can you seriously not connect to your computer over the Internet? Or you can occasionally walk within the range of your home's wifi and a program syncs your phone's data to your computer, bypassing your ISP. Or you can plug it in once in a while. Maybe charge it while it syncs.
vendors will have little choice but to hand it over.
One of the strongest arguments I have for why I want programs to work with local content. HEY, your ad-driven phone app sends all it's data back to a central repository detailing almost every facet of my life. That's great, but I think I'll pass.
What's that? People want this data on other devices? Why do you think that means it has to go live out on a server somewhere? Have you never heard of sync?
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid here. There certainly doesn't look like there's rampant wide-spread abuse of this sort of data. Yet. But it's still the sort of thing that rubs me the wrong way.
And let's not fool ourselves, deciding which cases get the spotlight is the linchpin of our society now. Take this fiasco in Ferguson. Every year there are shooting deaths and potential race issues. Why did this one get the attention it did?
Or the Monsanto case against the guy buying feed seed, and killing off the non-roundup ready seeds. He didn't sign any contract or agree to any of the stringent IP rules from Monsanto, but Monsanto chose to push for this guy's prosecution so that they could get a ruling about how this practice is illegal for everybody.
The selective enforcement of the law is a form of corruption. When legal precedent is on the line, it's practically a controlling factor.
did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that
But some fantastically AWESOME things in the realm of unmanned exploration. Which got us all the useful aspects of space exploration which the big price tag or the trouble of launching from mars. Downside: No martian space heroes.
whoa ho ho there. This whole thing is about some language nuance. If you're going to try and use a broad brush, you'd best use it consistently.
Because MLK and Rosa Parks were typically refereed to as "civil rights activists", and the term "social justice warrior" (I had to google that by the way) only gained traction THIS year.
If we're going to get in a huff over language, I believe that civil rights and social justice, while having a large overlap, aren't quite the same thing. Social justice is farther-reaching while civil rights fall short of, say, firing people over whether they call you a negro or black or a colored person.
Justice is usually a reactionary thing. Retaliatory even. Rights are things you have all the time. (And violating rights should lead to justice). It's really best to stay positive, and the SJW term brings with it a negative aspect that isn't going to help the effort.
Income tax brackets are not there to account for expenses,
That was the entire crux of bws111's argument that I was calling bullshit upon.
they're there on the principle that somebody like me can spare more money than somebody making minimum wage.
Also that people like us have more control over the economic system and can pull in more money then what's really fair. It's a progressive system because a capitalistic system is regressive, winners take all and the more you win the more you can take.
(Personal tax dodges
Are illegal, per the definition. A tax dodge means you're not paying money you owe....ah ah ah, I see the term has evolved a bit. Apparently tax "avoidance" is all the legal ways people avoid paying taxes while tax "evasion" is a crime.... fuckers.
and the capital gains tax are there on the principle that the rich shouldn't pay as much tax, proportionately, as everybody else.)
No. No no, don't drink the cool-aid. That's just a cynical view from the opposition. Capital gains taxes have a special status because, and this is the rational they use not the one I believe, because it's "already been taxed". They think that when you invest in a business, any gains the business has has been taxed, so when they sell that investment, they don't want to be taxed again. But that's bullshit and why the cynical view has developed.
If I buy a calf for $200, feed it till it's a cow, and then sell it for $1000, I pay taxes on $1000 of income. But if I buy a stock for $200, wait a few years, and sell it for $1000, then I pay a special lower rate because investing is some magical thing and it's not really property and all the other bullshit arguments.
But no, don't take the cynical view. That'll lead to an ulcer and make you a bitter man. Take the realist view that capital gains taxes are there because wealthy investors have control over the taxation system.
A variable is a hunk of memory that stores values that vary depending on what you put in there. A const variable is variable that doesn't vary. A volatile variable is a variable that might vary behind your back when you're not looking.
So what's is this? const volatile myVariable;
If it takes you more than a minute you might not be a Sr. C programmer.
It's an input pin, btw. Because const is really just a euphemism for "read-only". And volatile means something else can write to it. A big hurdle that keeps kids away from C is just the language barrier and the archaic terminology. Culture has moved on and has solidified the english language around some of these sort of things, but C is stuck back in the 70's. And if the term "pin" throws you for a loop, then you're probably out of your water and need to head back towards the island of abstraction which is a safe distance from the real world.
Well, it's a bit of dark humor, but yeah that heaven's gate suicide pact had all sorts of one-shot jokes made about them. And jesus riding a dinosaur? Come on. Yeah, that's an easy laugh. If you consider comedy to be a sport, you've got your hard cases like the terminally ill and the depressed. The risky maneuvers like joking about ebola or the sectarian violence in Iraq. Making a joke that has faith healers as the butt of the joke? Easy and safe. The only people you'll offend are nutcases anyway.
And that was just as good as any other explanation because no one really had a way to actually prove or disprove that
Right. The unknowable. I think I covered that. Today's scientists make claims about things that are falsifiable. And there is significant incentive for other scientists to prove that other's claims are false. Back in the day of religious claims, ANYTHING could be said to violate some part of whatever scripture, and the result was either a schism or an excommunication. That's a significant difference. You're trying to say the two scenarios are the same, when they're really not.
Now... things like this primordial gravity wave are honestly above my head and I don't pretend to understand what they're talking about. I vaguely have an impression of what the big-bang was and a collection of tidbits about it. But I'm not going to particularly care because it doesn't impact me much. (It's actually pretty exciting if we can glimpse past the big bang though.) But I dole out my tax money, and vote in the people pushing money to things like the NSF which helped fund the BICEP2. I do this and, yeah, somewhat blindly trust that the people the NSF employ to vouch for and approve grants for this sort of thing. A lot like I trust my mechanic to replace the wheel bearing. I trust that dude with my life, I can trust the NSF guy to read up on background radiation.
Today scientists say: "The Earth is this way because.... I know this because I did all these experiments and they were peer reviewed. Unfortunately, these experiments cost millions of dollars to do and require a PhD in that specific field to even understand what the experiments do.
Luckily for us we have enough PhDs in that specific field to call bullshit. Just like (some) open source projects have enough developers to keep everything running.
Most people aren't even at the level of technological savvy that is represented on this board, let alone actual PhDs. That means that people have to accept what another person tells them is true without being able to personally verify it.
Not quite. Even people that aren't the most well read or brightest can question things, and if they happen to have access to a smart enough accomplice can have the thing explained to them in a matter they can understand. And they can pick apart any section of it they feel like and see if it jives with everything else. Honestly, that's the basis for the technologically savviness of most people around here.
I'd agree that it's a practical sort of faith. But the system has a large number of self-correcting actors and occasional reality-checks that was severely lacking with the religions of old. If you REALLY boil it down, all of mathematics is based on a number of axioms that you simply have to accept as true, dare I say, "on faith". Have you ever really questioned the null set axiom? But of course, 2+2=4, due to an overwhelming amount of evidence.
Science is more like math than religion in that regard.
Sigh.... *Raises hand* Hey, in my defense, when most people say mid-west they really mean Chicago. And the cost of living there is not the same as here in miniscule Quad Cities. I know it's only three hours away, but it's still a difference. Here, I only know of CTOs and one developer making over 6 figures. Most of the makerspace is making under 80K, with a couple exceptions. The biggest factor is that, for an embedded guy like me, there are only about 3 companies that would employ me. And only one big fish. (It's John Deere). There are plenty of small side players for general business-level developers, and web-devs can live anywhere, right?
But yeah, with about a decade experience, I'm kinda feeling underpaid. The good news is that the whole family is headed for Colorado, where I hear there's more opportunity.
With a combined income of ~150k, we live a comfortable life in a 3 bed 3 bath and have saved up a net worth of about 300k. That's two engineers with no kids most of that time. We certainly feel like one of the wealthier people in the area.
Bravo for putting in the effort to explain how these things have socio-economic explanations. Usually I can't be bothered to put in the time and simply respond with "there have been studies". Which is admittedly lazy.
ShainhiBill was right. There is an IQ gap. But without pointing out the probable cause for the gap, it can come off as a little bit racist.
The part where he has all these leading questions is.... actually it just seems like a non-sequitur. I'm not even sure if he's trying to imply that it's genetic in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if all the homeless and unemployed had a fixed amount of income. Maybe $500-$600/mo
I worry about how much of that would simply be funneled to the casinos and liqueur marts. Maybe they are acceptable parasites. I imagine it would help some people. But some of the homeless are down'n'outers are there because they can't get their act together, and handing them money isn't going to necessarily help them do so.
Efforts to control what the money is spent on, like foodstamps, just makes a secondary market for exchanging funneymoney to real cash.
Directly controlling the supply of the resource doesn't work so well. At least here. Jesus, half of Hong Kong lives in public housing.
We will always find new use for laborers
What? If that was true, then there really wouldn't be any problems when factories had massive layoffs. And when they do eventually find work elsewhere, the extra competition drives down wages.
Universal vocational education--that is, college education--touted as a solution, is an exacerbating problem:
Except that there is work for people with real skills. Tech schools, trade schools, STEM degrees, and less so with philosophy or anthropology. We live in a different sort of soceity than the 70's. We don't need as much unskilled labor.
while a universal income always pays at 100%, and is thus immune to the fluctuations of economy.
Well.... I highly doubt that it wouldn't be a contentious issue and be tweaked up and down on a regular basis at the whims of the politicians and the voting blocs.
Sorry for the length, but it's hard not to go piece by piece when everything is just so wrong. And you know we can't have people being wrong on the Internet.
you believe that a 'court ruling' has to do with truth?
Sure, it's not iron-clad, but there's a strong correlation with the truth. And they lost the appeal too. And typically when there are questionable legal shindigs, you don't have the uppity-ups double-down and lay their reputation on the line with such hard language like:
"This case, however, is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
They pussyfoot around the call for plausible deniability.
i sincerely have no animosity toward you (even though you are apparently now my first 'foe' . i hope you are at least enjoying the humor in this exchange).
joking aside though
I find it useful to keep track of the crazies. And this exchange hasn't been humorous. I've tried to give the anti-vaccers a legitimate chance to convince me that there was something to their argument and you've failed to present anything other than vague fear-mongering and the name of a bullshit documentary.
i understand why this is hard to see, and why i no doubt seem to you like an a-hole crackpot. it's ok
No, it's really not. This is a debate in an open forum. If you just accept that you look like an asshole crackpot and lack the ability or facts or reason to justify your position, then trying to participate in the conversation actively damages your sides claim. You're both stirring up controversy, and then damning your own side of the argument by failing to deliver.
but these are larger issues about information control and a fundamentally deceptive process.
Uh huh, "it's a conspiracy"? Is that what you want to say? "We can't trust any information we find out there and the whole system is decieving us. All the doctors and scientists must be in on it." If this isn't the groundwork for some epic baseless fear-mongering I don't know what is.
Listen, there probably is a conspiracy of some sort. All it takes is two guys with a plan they don't tell anyone. That's a conspiracy. And I'm positive that the pharmaceutical companies are getting paid WAY too much money. And a sizeable chunk of that is probably straight up corruption. But I don't think that they're poisoning kids with vaccines just to make a buck.
and im not going to convince you absent a "manifesto",
I was really looking more for examples of what these "big changes with dirty fingerprints" are, what the dangers of vaccines are, and what exactly you're trying to raise awareness of. Something concrete that would either be refutable, or give your argument some legs to stand on.
ive said my peace.
Geeze, are you 12? Come on, "I've said my piece". It's not that hard. You're doing this from a phone aren't you....
If this was your piece, then you've got nothing except shadows and boogieman.
pft, hey, you should be a pastafarian. There's a book out there about it. Start there. After you've read it, you can come back to talk to me. Until then, imagine this whole thread was me trying to convert you to the religion and failing because I didn't actually say anything about it. loveysnugglepuppies, heckruler
But oh hey, SURE, let's go that extra mile to show you how you're wrong.
The Greater Good is a documentary film about the risks vs. benefits of vaccines ...
The three anecdotes around which the film is based on are those of:
Gabi Swank of Wichita, Kansas, who received an HPV vaccine and attributes a number of adverse reactions, including a seizure, to this experience,
Jordan King of Portland, Oregon, who regressed into autism following routine vaccination, and was one of the test cases for the autism omnibus proceedings and whose case was rejected by the Special Master, and
Victoria Grace Boyd Christener of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who died at the age of 5 months after receiving a vaccine.
Oh my god, it's an emotional gut-wrencher fluff piece about three specific individuals. First off, Gabi Swank's case derives from their Neurologist Dr. Lindholm claiming that her condition was caused by the vaccine. Hey, if he's got evidence that links the two, all the more power to him and getting that sort of thing published and the vaccine pulled. Shit happens yo, and we need to fix it. If it's real. But I can't find anything he's published about this. All I can find is a single quote and it's dropped like fart in the wind. Was this one stray comment from a doctor that the family picked up and ran with? Hey, the need to blame someone is strong. I get it. But choose your target with care.
Let's look at Jordan King of Portland and the autism omnibus proceedings:
On February 12, 2009, the court ruled in three test cases that the combination of the MMR vaccine and thiomersal-containing vaccines were not to blame for autism. Hastings concluded in his decision, "Unfortunately, the Cedillos have been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment."[17] The ruling was appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals,[18] and upheld.
"This case, however, is not a close case. The overall weight of the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ causation theories."
And an infant died, which sucks. We've come a long way in lowering the infant mortality rate. There's still the edge cases.
You're working REALLY HARD at NOT pointing out anything.
If it's hiding in plain sight, I imagine it'd be pretty easy to point out.
Yes, there's the possibility that you're just trolling for shits'n'giggles, but that's unlikely. There's the chance that you're literally paid to promote this sort of drama by... geeze, I don't even know. That's even less likely. I think you're most likely deluded and have been sucked in by propaganda and have a natural inclination to look for the scam. The exact sort of thing you're rallying against.
Now, commentators like Vermonter, operagost, and photon317 are arguing against this idea because it sets a bad precedence for government control, while they recognize that vaccines are important and good. You should really take a second look at the way they're presenting their point. You, on the other hand, seem to straddle the fence on the benefit of vaccines in general.
But come on, you're ranting about how people need to be informed, I'm asking you to inform me, and then you complain about having to "spoonfeed"? Even if you're not a troll, you're certainly not worth listening to, because you're not saying anything. Imagine you had to routinely pass by this group of really annoying people that had a bad reputation.
One of them runs up to you "HEY, LISTEN TO ME!"
And you uncharacteristically stop, turn to them, and replay "Yeah, what do you want?"
And then they run off saying "LOL, not a troll. Best regards"
there are BIG changes that have dirty fingerprints all over them.
Please state them. What are these changes? What are the dirty fingerprints?
the more you learn about the FDA, USDA, big pharmaceutical companies, and their legal exemptions from prosecution, the money's involved.. etc, the more you realize how obvious it is that there are real dangers and risks being passed along to the unwitting public in the interests of $.
Please state, explicitly, what those dangers are.
awareness needs to be raised
OF WHAT? So far you're throwing around vague fearmongering. Come on, do the work, put in the effort, reasearch it a bit, cite those sources, and present your argument.
I have very little trust in bigPharma, and like most megacorps, they're probably swindling the masses for all they can. But just because, say, ConAgra is getting Tax breaks doesn't mean that corn is poison or we should stop eating food.
Doesn't matter. Law enforcement can get that data with (or without) a warrant. Likewise, this data is more or less publicly available if there are ever any security breaches. And we all know that someone like FitBit would pay the utmost attention to critical information like.... how often you giggled your wrist.
Not that my home computer would be all that much secure. But it makes it a far less juicy target if there's just the one guy.
And those HIPPA laws only ever come into affect if you're cognizant of someone handing out your information. If someone out there simply knows all your details, you can't sue them, as they could have gotten it from anywhere. The problem with a retaliatory legal system is that if your rights get violated in secret and the effects linger or cause legal effects, then you're boned because you can't prove it happened. Not that I know anything better. But I don't have faith in the legal system to protect me from the legal system or people in the shadows.
Relax, I'm really not offended. I find your schoolyard level whining to be, at most, adorable.
But that doesn't mean it's not a death threat:
"Someone should probably be beheaded. Someone like you."
See that? You're suggesting I should have my head cut off. But no, it's obviously not serious and obviously you're impotent in this regard so I really don't feel threatened. It's only a small step above "hey you, go DIAF".
Now.... in case you actually hang around... think about what you're doing here. You're posing a message that you believe would endanger your job. The term "fire-able offense" comes to mind. Is that the sort of grassroots defense that the would help absolve the CIA of their international crime? (And yes, the USA signed that covenant) Do you REALLY think that suggesting I be brutally murdered is a good way to point out the difference between torture and execution?
Oh my goodness, an anonymous death-threat from someone defending CIA's torture on an online forum. That's adorable. I feel like I must be doing something right.
You know I always thought that the group of people that complained about death threats were overplaying it. I mean, who would actually send death-threats to someone complaining about torture? Or that lady complaining about how women are treated in video games, or the police brutality crowd. It really doesn't lend any weight to their argument. It makes them come off as... well... violent psychopaths with a REALLY bad grasp of irony. The exact sort of stereotype that they're being accused of being.
It's the sort of thing that makes me suspicious of some sort of casual agent provocateur. Or "trolling" if you prefer the newer term. But once you start with those sort of questions you might as well be jumping at shadows.
Damn shame he's a coward though. I'd like to hear how he thought that'd be a helpful comment.
Certain detainees were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), which the Department of Justice determined at the time to be lawful and which were duly authorized by the Bush Administration. These techniques, which were last used by the CIA in December 2007, subsequently were prohibited by an Executive Order issued by President Obama when he took office in January 2009.
Damn straight that guy deserves a medal.
Wish he had kept up that sort of perspective.
CIA officers are rightly proud and honored to be part of an organization that is indispensable to our national security.
Don't be too sure about that bub.
The featured article implies that Fitbit is in fact being used as a black box, despite not originally having been intended so.
No it didn't. The lawyer looked at historical data of the trainer's fitbit device. It was not the last remaining record of a airliners's demise. Nor was the wearer of the fitbit... you know.... killed.
Here we go, from another news article:
The data will be provided by the plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit in an effort to show life-affecting reduced activity post injury
Which could honestly just be the trainer not wearing the bracelet as often.
That works for the Fitbit's original intended use but not for the black box use described in the featured article.
Also, I want to point out here that the data from these devices are being used not as originally intended. Hey, it was useful for the client this time. Maybe. But you're argument here is pointing out that your data can be used to show all sorts of things. That's typically something I'd use to point out how bad of an idea it is to have a third party hold onto all this data.
Anyway, regardless of all that, it doesn't matter, someone could actually want some sort of device to act like a blackbox. Like if they were recording cops at checkpoints. I would still want that data backed up to my own computer rather than trusting "the cloud". Most specifically if I had a concern that the police might try and confiscate/lose my phone and it's recorded data.
Over the Internet? Can you seriously not connect to your computer over the Internet?
Not if your computer's Internet connection doesn't allow incoming connections, whether because of CGNAT applied by your home ISP, because of a "no servers" clause in your home ISP's terms of service,
Wow, that sucks balls. Yeah, no, if we're talking about the merits of software architectures, and which way we'd prefer things to operate, I'm going to go ahead and announce that I wouldn't purchase that service. Ever. If I got such a service, and I found I couldn't run a minecraft server, or ssh into my box, or hell, does skype work with that? Yeah, no, if I found out that's what I'd bought, I'd promptly drop it and go get something that, you know, functions.
or because it is in suspend mode to save electric power.
. . . come on dude.
You want objects in C? DONE.
You want simple inheritance? Here you go:
struct father
{
struct father* next;
};
struct son
{
struct father inheritance;
char* yobro;
};
But if you want a thing that contains data structures, code, and interfaces like an object in C++... that's just a .c and .h file.
Inheriting and expanding that code base in a real object oriented way is going to involve some crazy shenanigans with a lot of function pointers like you see in the GTK. It's just not simple and clean in C.
No, C is not going to get objects. If you gave it objects, that would be a fork, and many many other people have tried that. Some of them did a decent job.
C is going to be in the future. But it's not going to compete with Java, C#, or C++. And certainly not with whatever crazy web-dev language of the week they have.
comparable to boost
OMG NO.
NO! My precious fitbit data! No one must know about my secret midnight workouts!
Ok, I know this is a low-grade troll, but hey, this is the sort of argument rummaging around in the back of laypeople's heads. Lemme tackle this one head on.
This boils down to ol' classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument, implying that anyone that is hiding anything, or advocates privacy in any way is up to no good. The broad scope of this argument has all sorts of come-backs: the right to privacy itself, unintended details becoming public (I was only half-joking about secret midnight workouts. Do you wear this thing to bed? Are you comfortable with everyone knowing when your wife woke you up?), security and vulnerability concerns, are you gay? Do you believe the earth is 6K years old? Do you want all your co-workers to know how much money you make/spend? Anyway, there are plenty of arguments for why privacy in general is good.
Specifically though, I lamented the fact that cops can go grab corporate data. You know, in pursuit of a criminal investigation, theoretically. And if the system worked as it was supposed to, and there was no police abuse, warrant were a real requirement, and they only used to catch the bad guys, hey, I'd be ok with that. I honestly do want the cops to be able to open locks when chasing anti-social criminal fuckers.
Unfortunately, the amount of trust I have in the system is waning. Now, the people with the authority to use these powers and ability to abuse these powers are really only going to make your life hard if they have cause to. It's not yet a for-profit system of abuse. NSA interns can probably still go search their girlfriends travel patterns, but meh. This is where the paranoid part come in. I'm worried about the legal system being bypassed (with warrantless wiretaps), all this data being collected as a routine measure (and stored in the NSA's Utah facility), and the current political powerhouse pressuring someone into giving them all the dirt on the opposing politician. Or some diehard Whig loyalist sending it anonymously. Or someone who hates black people and hippies. And now you have a sole political individual or party that has the power to dredge up the dirt on their opponent and run unopposed. I don't really care if some cop has the ability to look through my personal data. I'm honestly pretty vanilla and boring. But the idea that some hardliner could spy on my politician? Bad mojo right there.
Also, This is hilarious. Took me a bit to realize it was a parody site. We're approaching Poe's law when it comes to this stuff.
Hey tepples, how you doing? Slashdot mods, you get in here too.
Listen, I'm not even mad. I understand I'm not always the most eloquent and well spoken. But the idea you're suggesting here is the exact thing I was shooting down.
Yes, if you want to collect more data than will fit on the device (Gigs, we have GIGABYTES to work with), or you want backups made, or the thing is acting like a blackbox (which fitbit is not), then... and try and follow me here.... "you'd want this data on other devices." Right? It's on your phone collecting data, but you want it on a different device. Maybe the NSA's servers. Or the cloud. Or maybe you'd rather you set up a program to sync the data between your phone and your desktop. That's what I was suggesting. That people backup their phone's data onto their own personal desktops rather than uploading this data to some company's servers. I typically refer to that action as "syncing". It keeps the data in sync between two locations. And I own both. And now the storage of the device and the survivability of the device aren't as important.
To someone else, you commented:
That's exactly why I want the data to go to MY server at home.
How are you going to get it from your phone to your home server across an ISP's NAT?
Over the Internet? Can you seriously not connect to your computer over the Internet?
Or you can occasionally walk within the range of your home's wifi and a program syncs your phone's data to your computer, bypassing your ISP.
Or you can plug it in once in a while. Maybe charge it while it syncs.
vendors will have little choice but to hand it over.
One of the strongest arguments I have for why I want programs to work with local content.
HEY, your ad-driven phone app sends all it's data back to a central repository detailing almost every facet of my life. That's great, but I think I'll pass.
What's that? People want this data on other devices? Why do you think that means it has to go live out on a server somewhere? Have you never heard of sync?
Perhaps I'm just being paranoid here. There certainly doesn't look like there's rampant wide-spread abuse of this sort of data. Yet. But it's still the sort of thing that rubs me the wrong way.
And let's not fool ourselves, deciding which cases get the spotlight is the linchpin of our society now. Take this fiasco in Ferguson. Every year there are shooting deaths and potential race issues. Why did this one get the attention it did?
Or the Monsanto case against the guy buying feed seed, and killing off the non-roundup ready seeds. He didn't sign any contract or agree to any of the stringent IP rules from Monsanto, but Monsanto chose to push for this guy's prosecution so that they could get a ruling about how this practice is illegal for everybody.
The selective enforcement of the law is a form of corruption. When legal precedent is on the line, it's practically a controlling factor.
did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that
But some fantastically AWESOME things in the realm of unmanned exploration. Which got us all the useful aspects of space exploration which the big price tag or the trouble of launching from mars. Downside: No martian space heroes.
Give it a rest grandpa, robots are the future.
whoa ho ho there. This whole thing is about some language nuance. If you're going to try and use a broad brush, you'd best use it consistently.
Because MLK and Rosa Parks were typically refereed to as "civil rights activists", and the term "social justice warrior" (I had to google that by the way) only gained traction THIS year.
If we're going to get in a huff over language, I believe that civil rights and social justice, while having a large overlap, aren't quite the same thing. Social justice is farther-reaching while civil rights fall short of, say, firing people over whether they call you a negro or black or a colored person.
Justice is usually a reactionary thing. Retaliatory even. Rights are things you have all the time. (And violating rights should lead to justice). It's really best to stay positive, and the SJW term brings with it a negative aspect that isn't going to help the effort.
Income tax brackets are not there to account for expenses,
That was the entire crux of bws111's argument that I was calling bullshit upon.
they're there on the principle that somebody like me can spare more money than somebody making minimum wage.
Also that people like us have more control over the economic system and can pull in more money then what's really fair. It's a progressive system because a capitalistic system is regressive, winners take all and the more you win the more you can take.
(Personal tax dodges
Are illegal, per the definition. A tax dodge means you're not paying money you owe. ...ah ah ah, I see the term has evolved a bit. Apparently tax "avoidance" is all the legal ways people avoid paying taxes while tax "evasion" is a crime.... fuckers.
and the capital gains tax are there on the principle that the rich shouldn't pay as much tax, proportionately, as everybody else.)
No. No no, don't drink the cool-aid. That's just a cynical view from the opposition. Capital gains taxes have a special status because, and this is the rational they use not the one I believe, because it's "already been taxed". They think that when you invest in a business, any gains the business has has been taxed, so when they sell that investment, they don't want to be taxed again. But that's bullshit and why the cynical view has developed.
If I buy a calf for $200, feed it till it's a cow, and then sell it for $1000, I pay taxes on $1000 of income. But if I buy a stock for $200, wait a few years, and sell it for $1000, then I pay a special lower rate because investing is some magical thing and it's not really property and all the other bullshit arguments.
But no, don't take the cynical view. That'll lead to an ulcer and make you a bitter man. Take the realist view that capital gains taxes are there because wealthy investors have control over the taxation system.
A variable is a hunk of memory that stores values that vary depending on what you put in there.
A const variable is variable that doesn't vary.
A volatile variable is a variable that might vary behind your back when you're not looking.
So what's is this?
const volatile myVariable;
If it takes you more than a minute you might not be a Sr. C programmer.
It's an input pin, btw. Because const is really just a euphemism for "read-only". And volatile means something else can write to it. A big hurdle that keeps kids away from C is just the language barrier and the archaic terminology. Culture has moved on and has solidified the english language around some of these sort of things, but C is stuck back in the 70's. And if the term "pin" throws you for a loop, then you're probably out of your water and need to head back towards the island of abstraction which is a safe distance from the real world.
I assumed you were referring to Nethack's blessed/cursed system.
I too, am a big fan of Piet. Loved programming in Paint, the RIGHT way!
Is it really an easy laugh?
Well, it's a bit of dark humor, but yeah that heaven's gate suicide pact had all sorts of one-shot jokes made about them. And jesus riding a dinosaur? Come on. Yeah, that's an easy laugh. If you consider comedy to be a sport, you've got your hard cases like the terminally ill and the depressed. The risky maneuvers like joking about ebola or the sectarian violence in Iraq. Making a joke that has faith healers as the butt of the joke? Easy and safe. The only people you'll offend are nutcases anyway.
And that was just as good as any other explanation because no one really had a way to actually prove or disprove that
Right. The unknowable. I think I covered that. Today's scientists make claims about things that are falsifiable. And there is significant incentive for other scientists to prove that other's claims are false. Back in the day of religious claims, ANYTHING could be said to violate some part of whatever scripture, and the result was either a schism or an excommunication. That's a significant difference. You're trying to say the two scenarios are the same, when they're really not.
Now... things like this primordial gravity wave are honestly above my head and I don't pretend to understand what they're talking about. I vaguely have an impression of what the big-bang was and a collection of tidbits about it. But I'm not going to particularly care because it doesn't impact me much. (It's actually pretty exciting if we can glimpse past the big bang though.) But I dole out my tax money, and vote in the people pushing money to things like the NSF which helped fund the BICEP2. I do this and, yeah, somewhat blindly trust that the people the NSF employ to vouch for and approve grants for this sort of thing. A lot like I trust my mechanic to replace the wheel bearing. I trust that dude with my life, I can trust the NSF guy to read up on background radiation.
Today scientists say: "The Earth is this way because.... I know this because I did all these experiments and they were peer reviewed. Unfortunately, these experiments cost millions of dollars to do and require a PhD in that specific field to even understand what the experiments do.
Luckily for us we have enough PhDs in that specific field to call bullshit. Just like (some) open source projects have enough developers to keep everything running.
Most people aren't even at the level of technological savvy that is represented on this board, let alone actual PhDs. That means that people have to accept what another person tells them is true without being able to personally verify it.
Not quite. Even people that aren't the most well read or brightest can question things, and if they happen to have access to a smart enough accomplice can have the thing explained to them in a matter they can understand. And they can pick apart any section of it they feel like and see if it jives with everything else. Honestly, that's the basis for the technologically savviness of most people around here.
I'd agree that it's a practical sort of faith. But the system has a large number of self-correcting actors and occasional reality-checks that was severely lacking with the religions of old. If you REALLY boil it down, all of mathematics is based on a number of axioms that you simply have to accept as true, dare I say, "on faith". Have you ever really questioned the null set axiom? But of course, 2+2=4, due to an overwhelming amount of evidence.
Science is more like math than religion in that regard.
Sigh.... *Raises hand*
Hey, in my defense, when most people say mid-west they really mean Chicago. And the cost of living there is not the same as here in miniscule Quad Cities. I know it's only three hours away, but it's still a difference.
Here, I only know of CTOs and one developer making over 6 figures. Most of the makerspace is making under 80K, with a couple exceptions.
The biggest factor is that, for an embedded guy like me, there are only about 3 companies that would employ me. And only one big fish. (It's John Deere). There are plenty of small side players for general business-level developers, and web-devs can live anywhere, right?
But yeah, with about a decade experience, I'm kinda feeling underpaid. The good news is that the whole family is headed for Colorado, where I hear there's more opportunity.
With a combined income of ~150k, we live a comfortable life in a 3 bed 3 bath and have saved up a net worth of about 300k.
That's two engineers with no kids most of that time. We certainly feel like one of the wealthier people in the area.
Well that had to be a lot of work.
Bravo for putting in the effort to explain how these things have socio-economic explanations. Usually I can't be bothered to put in the time and simply respond with "there have been studies". Which is admittedly lazy.
ShainhiBill was right. There is an IQ gap. But without pointing out the probable cause for the gap, it can come off as a little bit racist.
The part where he has all these leading questions is.... actually it just seems like a non-sequitur. I'm not even sure if he's trying to imply that it's genetic in nature.