It's hard to write about Kickstarter projects, because there are so many cool ideas that seem to deserve funding it's simply overwhelming. The TouchFire keyboard is one of those cool ideas, too, but it's far surpassed the founders' original funding goals and is nearing production.
I've been very interested in a kickstarter project for the last six months, one I didn't know about until the deadline passed.. It reached almost 300% of it's funding level, started production, and...nothing.
They have an official website, and it never seemed to change. It was always "Sign up for the mailing list; we'll let you know when we've completed the kickstarter orders and can take orders from the public!" I had no idea when and if they were ever actually going to put out a product I could buy; I've already bought a conventional model in that time.
I finally noticed today that they were updating their kickstarter page; they've been posting their progress in detail and expect to take public orders next month. I just wasn't looking there because I didn't get in on the kickstart and did I mention they have an official website?
Sometimes kickstarter is awesome; sometimes it's an intolerable pain in the ass to be someone's guinea pig in the transition from garage engineer to functional company.
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India)
English is an official language of India, and not the primary one. The primary official language is Hindi - you know, their native language.
I realize it's vastly preferable that they speak English if they work for you, but you're implying there's actually something wrong with Indians who don't speak English, and that's absurd. There's nothing any more backward or stupid about an Indian who doesn't speak English than there is with a Canadian who doesn't speak French or a Belgian who doesn't speak German.
Don't practice the cultural ignorance and arrogance that befalls other Americans. I think you're smarter than that.
Greenpeace are extensively established as absolutely against almost all uses of nuclear power. They don't give a flying fuck about "increasing security" or pointing out possible threats; they want those plants shutdown entirely, and yesterday.
Putting on a white hat doesn't make you a White Hat; they're only dressing up their usual tactics in the guise of a benevolent hack. This is just a publicity stunt in their campaign to destroy nuclear power.
If you bought a V10 car and it turned out to have a 4 cylinder, you'd be upset. No?
Yeah, if it turned out it couldn't climb hills and had a 0 - 60 time of 17.1 seconds. If it performed like I wanted and happened to have only 4 cylinders I wouldn't care. Unless one of my primary 'needs' was for everyone to know I had a big-ass 'engine', if you know what I mean.
Put more directly, benchmarks and statistics are just dick measuring without some context.
Transistor count is closely tied to cache size. This CPU just went from "Extreme Edition" to "Celeron" to use Intel terminology.
Alright, but doesn't that response just transform my question about transistor count in the whole processor into exactly the same question about transistor count in the SRAM? If the cache size and performance of the whole unit are reported accurately, should real people care how many transistors there are?
Is there some kickass use case for a chip with a SuperPi score of X, a SPEC score of Y, a 6MB cache, 8 threads, 2.9 GHZ clock, and 2 billion transistors that totally falls apart on a processor with the first five traits but only 1.2 billion transistors?
I understand the importance of truth in advertising, but is this information meaningful, or just an insignificant correction? The magnitude of the difference alone doesn't automatically make this an important story, or the exposure of some big, inexcusable lie by AMD.
What's the true relevance of transistor count? If I see two processors with identical performance and power efficiency but radically different transistor counts do I have any real world incentive to select one over the other? I mean, presumably the one with fewer transistors in roughly the same die space might overclock better, might have a longer MTBF, etc., but beyond that should I care?
Or did timothy post this just to keep up the fanboi flame wars?
For some reason I trust the Daily Show for more accurate news then real news outlets...
And the mystery of America's dysfunction deepens.
If you don't trust any of the 'real' news outlets then go do some research and figure out a bit of the truth yourself, or start finding trustworthy alternative papers and check their sources. Or don't bother with news at all.
The Daily Show is an entertainment product; just because it has a little news (and a big helping of insouciant liberal sarcasm) doesn't mean it's acceptable as a primary source of information. I'd rather watch the Daily Show than Nancy Grace or Glenn Beck, and I know the Daily Show will contain more true statements and fewer lies, but it's still not real news. It's something you watch after you figure out the real news, for some black comedy and hyperbole about how much the world sucks.
People who depend primarily on the Daily Show are better than people who depend primarily on Fox News, but not a lot.
No kidding. I pirated DNF in the first place and thanked Gearbox in my heart for making it. Figured I'd buy the Balls of Steel edition if the game was decent and make sure they got some profit. After 5 hours of game time I sent them a bill for $3125.
I demanded $25 an hour for 5 hours of game time, and $3000 for psychiatrist visits - therapy to recover from the rape of my childhood.
These are great results, but they apply only to a small number of European countries. The people who are about to say: "See! If only RIAA would back the fuck off they'd make the same profits anyway!" are completely unjustified in using this particular study to support their argument.
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries. Lots of people don't even lock their doors in Denmark; they leave strollers with children in them outside the store while they grab a gallon of milk. I'm not saying there are no criminals and no extreme downloaders, but in general there's more respect for others' property and more belief that everyone is in things together. It's not surprising that such people still spend a great deal of money on entertainment in addition to some downloading.
In the United States, however, it's totally different. Individualism and extreme selfishness are far more common. I know tons of people who download in excess of 5 times as much as they buy, and I myself download literally 99% of what I consume.
I'm not here to say that RIAA and the MPAA are right/wrong, or that they're making/not making enough money even with downloading; those are all separate talks. What I am saying is that a study about the Netherlands (this study is based on data from the Netherlands, which the Swiss consider highly analogous to their own country) doesn't prove a damn thing about intellectual property law or the state of entertainment businesses in the US, so stop drawing stupid parallels before you start.
I'd be a lot more proud of the guy if this demo was funded by someone who gives a shit about science.
Breitling makes designer watches for men. They don't fund this guy for the sake of science or nerd fun or any other interesting purpose.
His entire purpose up there is selling the James Bond image that marketers try to associate with fancy watches, expensive cognac, race car camp, etc. Really, Yves Rossy serves no higher purpose than the pair of DD tits on the fashion model draped over the man who just so happens to be wearing a Breitling watch.
I see from his biography that Rossy is a fighter pilot and aeronautical engineer who still flies commercially, so Breitling probably isn't his major backer. But still, the self-impressed, spendthrift 'gentleman' image he's shilling for with this flight disgusts me.
Much as humans hate them, mosquitoes constitute a potent food source to smaller vertebrates. Mammals represent massive concentrations of energy, and blood is a high energy substrate. Mosquitoes are a huge power source of fish, bats, etc. when they're caught still full of blood, and they're easy to catch.
I read in the one of the article links that the ecological impact isn't expected to be a serious problem, but I find that difficult to accept. And there are certainly detractors to that theory in the scientific community.
Is eradicating malaria, West Nile, etc. really worth the risks? They may be highly threatening to humans, but ultimately we still have to live here after the mosquitoes are gone...
I still can't fathom spending $300 on a video card....and feeling like I got a slammin deal in the process.
What happened to the red-hot competition of 2008, when I built my first modern system and got a newly released Radeon 4850 for $150? That card was maybe the fourth most powerful you could get; there was no serious improvement to be had without adding more dies, via either X2 cards or crossfire.
Now today the 560 Ti and the 6950 occupy the same relative position in the hierarchy of GPUs that my 4850 held in 2008...yet rather than being brand new and $150 those two cards are almost a year old and $250-$300.
I really hope publishers cave in and figure out a way of pricing things better.
I think I should be spending more on entertainment; I'm starting to feel much guiltier about stealing everything but comic books, occasional paperbacks, and the three video games per decade I like enough to buy a collector's edition.
At the same time, the release prices for entertainment are completely batshit crazy. Games are $60, books are $35, and movies are $12? Who can afford that crap? Those prices all fall pretty quickly, but can't they come up with a better model than fleecing their most eager customers and then doling it out one step at a time to the next most impressive or convenient formats?
I don't know; maybe they can't. I just know I laugh when I see those numbers breakdowns, and I've seen them from official sources multiple times, in which publishers swear to God they only make a 1% profit.
I was under the impression that computer science was a bubble degree: the latest degree that people with any shred of scientific acumen and no clue where they wanted to go in life acquired as their ticket to an upper-middle class paycheck. So what's surprising and disastrous about the bubble bursting? Isn't that what bubbles do?
I always hear people on slashdot bitching that half the youngsters getting computer science degrees today are incompetent code monkeys at best, and yet then I read stories the next week about the problem of declining interest or falling numbers in comp-sci education.
Which one is the truth? Shouldn't you be happy to see enrollments decline? Aren't you glad to see fewer incompetent, bobble-headed lemmings graduating and going out to make a bad name for all of you self-proclaimed 'competent' computer scientists?
I know half of you are screaming at your monitors that "security through obscurity is no security at all", but security in biological information is not like that of computer code and hardware.
It all comes down the the breadth and transparency of the ecosystem, in my layman's opinion. It's entirely plausible with, for example, Adobe software running on Windows operating systems to say that if White Hat A found it then certainly Grey Hat B and Mustache Twirling Russian Mafioso Black Hat C will find it or have already found and exploited it. Those are specific, limited, and completely knowable ecosystems invented entirely by humans, however. Of course someone else will find it; the universe in which "it" lives isn't terribly large, when you really look at the situation.
Biology, on the other hand, is much bigger and much more mysterious; we're far stupider in biology than in any other science. We certainly didn't invent, do not control, and do not understand the ecosystems involved. You know far less from the sentence "I found five mutations that transform a particular H5N1 into a global killer." than you do from the sentence "I found a stack overflow hack in Acrobat which lets me read any pdf the target machine opens."
In short, security through obscurity actually gets you a very long way in biological research. Not to mention that creating a virus is a lot faster than creating the vaccine; perhaps a substance of which a single vial released in downtown Detroit could kill half the humans on Earth long before the antidote was invented and adequately synthesized isn't the place to object on principle some deliberate obscurity.
Seriously, look at the way flu vaccines are prepared. Maybe people should argue for the development of a faster way of inventing and growing vaccine (that is to say, faster than trial-and-error monkey testing followed by incubation in chicken eggs) before they request that blueprints for a killer flu become public information.
The Daily Mail is closer to a tabloid than to a newspaper. Technically it's 'middle-market', so it has some real stories in there, but I'd never rely on it as a sole source for any opinion or discussion....which is what this summary asks us to do.
Can we just agree that Apple hardware articles are flamebait by default, especially the ones about the mere possibility of new Apple hardware, and stop frickin posting them?
You can object to TSA practices - the violation of privacy, the ineffectiveness, and the rare but flagrant acts of sadism or molestation - without the pointless exaggeration. To hear you talk I'd be much safer and more comfortable wearing a "Democracy Now!" through Pyongyang Station than I would be boarding a California bullet train.
Blathering about pedophilia, fascism, and interrogations just makes your objections sound like paranoid ravings. Yes, you must be persistent, passionate, and creative in protecting your rights and protesting their violation, but above all you must be rational.
Your words are nothing but a disservice to anyone fighting for the Bill of Rights: it makes their job much harder when their rational objections become conflated with the rampant hyperbole and absurdly loaded language of people like you.
Your post wasn't exactly lengthy; of course I read it carefully. I even quoted the word 'normal', and stated that you were partially correct, in my summary sentence. Your problem is that you started your post with the dramatically overreaching statement that there was no evolutionary process for humans. A second (and final) sentence in which you only allude to understanding the reality doesn't cancel out the sheer foolishness of your first sentence.
If you think I misunderstood you then you have no cause for offense, unless you're offended by your own poor writing.
Since the development of civilization some 5000 years ago there hasn't been an evolutionary process for homo sapiens. The fact that man has pretty much controlled his environment since then has put an end to normal selection processes, as is evidenced by the explosion in population levels.
I don't think you understand evolution in a properly broad sense.
Evolution isn't only about selection pressure, for one thing. For every gene that becomes common because everyone without it died or didn't fuck enough (or the converse), there's another one that became common out of sheer randomness. Neutral drift, duplication events, etc. cause a lot of evolution, and occasionally lead to traits with massive selection coefficients, without those processes themselves or their intermediary products ever being subject to significant selection pressure.
Mankind is at least as susceptible to evolution as we ever were; I'd argue we're actually the most susceptible species that's ever existed. We've managed many selection pressures in ways no other present species can even emulate; that is true. We've also created unique, sapien-exclusive selection pressures upon ourselves, and greatly amplified other ordinary selection pressures, upon ourselves and the planet as a whole.
You're correct that some of our selection pressures are no longer 'normal'; you're completely wrong to suppose that we're no longer subject to evolution.
I see there are already five identical replies, so I'll pick yours at random to answer.
I'm not stupid; I understand that vaccines train the immune system. My point is that the kind of 'training' vaccines introduce is military in style: a strict vaccination schedule trains every single immune system on the same precise schedule, with identical doses of genetically identical antigens.
Training every single person against precisely the same threats in precisely the same way will work fine against the known threats, but we don't know what it does against the unknown threats. I'm not saying immune systems will be worse against unknown threats; I don't know. It may be a non-issue. It may also be that, just like monoculture in crops (although this is a much lesser degree; we're hardly producing immunological clones), giving everyone so much of the same training does makes us more vulnerable to various unknown threats in the long run. We may be training ourselves into greater susceptibility for a disease that doesn't even exist yet, one which preys precisely upon our highly similar resistances to so many other diseases. The massive variability of the human immune system is its greatest strength; anything that could train out some of that variability concerns me. It's a good question, and not one to be immediately dismissed as 'flamebait'.
I'm trying to raise a long-term, evolutionary question about the usefulness of vaccines. When I speak to a possible lack of 'training', I mean the kind of training that encourages diversity in our immunological gene pool rather than potentially discouraging it.
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Even if I accept your certain statement, with absolutely no evidence behind it, you've missed the point. You either didn't read my entire post or you didn't read the article and look into which vaccines the Australians are giving. My point is that Australia doesn't appear to be "decreasing the incidence of a few, serious infections"; they seem to be vaccinating against every single thing they possibly can. If a vaccine exists and there's more than a one in a hundred thousand chance of a child getting the disease, they'll give the vaccine.
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to harass some elected officials in my new state of North Carolina.
"Governor Perdue, why did you sign a bill, written by Time Warner lobbyists, which effectively banned municipal broadband in North Carolina?"
It's hard to write about Kickstarter projects, because there are so many cool ideas that seem to deserve funding it's simply overwhelming. The TouchFire keyboard is one of those cool ideas, too, but it's far surpassed the founders' original funding goals and is nearing production.
I've been very interested in a kickstarter project for the last six months, one I didn't know about until the deadline passed.. It reached almost 300% of it's funding level, started production, and...nothing.
They have an official website, and it never seemed to change. It was always "Sign up for the mailing list; we'll let you know when we've completed the kickstarter orders and can take orders from the public!" I had no idea when and if they were ever actually going to put out a product I could buy; I've already bought a conventional model in that time.
I finally noticed today that they were updating their kickstarter page; they've been posting their progress in detail and expect to take public orders next month. I just wasn't looking there because I didn't get in on the kickstart and did I mention they have an official website?
Sometimes kickstarter is awesome; sometimes it's an intolerable pain in the ass to be someone's guinea pig in the transition from garage engineer to functional company.
The main problem I've had with Indian programmers is that a lot of them don't really understand english (even though it is the official language of India)
English is an official language of India, and not the primary one. The primary official language is Hindi - you know, their native language.
I realize it's vastly preferable that they speak English if they work for you, but you're implying there's actually something wrong with Indians who don't speak English, and that's absurd. There's nothing any more backward or stupid about an Indian who doesn't speak English than there is with a Canadian who doesn't speak French or a Belgian who doesn't speak German.
Don't practice the cultural ignorance and arrogance that befalls other Americans. I think you're smarter than that.
I can't even imagine a more disingenuous stunt.
Greenpeace are extensively established as absolutely against almost all uses of nuclear power. They don't give a flying fuck about "increasing security" or pointing out possible threats; they want those plants shutdown entirely, and yesterday.
Putting on a white hat doesn't make you a White Hat; they're only dressing up their usual tactics in the guise of a benevolent hack. This is just a publicity stunt in their campaign to destroy nuclear power.
If you bought a V10 car and it turned out to have a 4 cylinder, you'd be upset. No?
Yeah, if it turned out it couldn't climb hills and had a 0 - 60 time of 17.1 seconds. If it performed like I wanted and happened to have only 4 cylinders I wouldn't care. Unless one of my primary 'needs' was for everyone to know I had a big-ass 'engine', if you know what I mean.
Put more directly, benchmarks and statistics are just dick measuring without some context.
Transistor count is closely tied to cache size. This CPU just went from "Extreme Edition" to "Celeron" to use Intel terminology.
Alright, but doesn't that response just transform my question about transistor count in the whole processor into exactly the same question about transistor count in the SRAM? If the cache size and performance of the whole unit are reported accurately, should real people care how many transistors there are?
Is there some kickass use case for a chip with a SuperPi score of X, a SPEC score of Y, a 6MB cache, 8 threads, 2.9 GHZ clock, and 2 billion transistors that totally falls apart on a processor with the first five traits but only 1.2 billion transistors?
This story will definitely break slashdot's sperm joke record
I understand the importance of truth in advertising, but is this information meaningful, or just an insignificant correction? The magnitude of the difference alone doesn't automatically make this an important story, or the exposure of some big, inexcusable lie by AMD.
What's the true relevance of transistor count? If I see two processors with identical performance and power efficiency but radically different transistor counts do I have any real world incentive to select one over the other? I mean, presumably the one with fewer transistors in roughly the same die space might overclock better, might have a longer MTBF, etc., but beyond that should I care?
Or did timothy post this just to keep up the fanboi flame wars?
For some reason I trust the Daily Show for more accurate news then real news outlets...
And the mystery of America's dysfunction deepens.
If you don't trust any of the 'real' news outlets then go do some research and figure out a bit of the truth yourself, or start finding trustworthy alternative papers and check their sources. Or don't bother with news at all.
The Daily Show is an entertainment product; just because it has a little news (and a big helping of insouciant liberal sarcasm) doesn't mean it's acceptable as a primary source of information. I'd rather watch the Daily Show than Nancy Grace or Glenn Beck, and I know the Daily Show will contain more true statements and fewer lies, but it's still not real news. It's something you watch after you figure out the real news, for some black comedy and hyperbole about how much the world sucks.
People who depend primarily on the Daily Show are better than people who depend primarily on Fox News, but not a lot.
I don't condone piracy but I can understand it.
No kidding. I pirated DNF in the first place and thanked Gearbox in my heart for making it. Figured I'd buy the Balls of Steel edition if the game was decent and make sure they got some profit. After 5 hours of game time I sent them a bill for $3125.
I demanded $25 an hour for 5 hours of game time, and $3000 for psychiatrist visits - therapy to recover from the rape of my childhood.
Haven't heard back yet....
These are great results, but they apply only to a small number of European countries. The people who are about to say: "See! If only RIAA would back the fuck off they'd make the same profits anyway!" are completely unjustified in using this particular study to support their argument.
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. all have more socialism and more general social trust (as I understand it) than most countries. Lots of people don't even lock their doors in Denmark; they leave strollers with children in them outside the store while they grab a gallon of milk. I'm not saying there are no criminals and no extreme downloaders, but in general there's more respect for others' property and more belief that everyone is in things together. It's not surprising that such people still spend a great deal of money on entertainment in addition to some downloading.
In the United States, however, it's totally different. Individualism and extreme selfishness are far more common. I know tons of people who download in excess of 5 times as much as they buy, and I myself download literally 99% of what I consume.
I'm not here to say that RIAA and the MPAA are right/wrong, or that they're making/not making enough money even with downloading; those are all separate talks. What I am saying is that a study about the Netherlands (this study is based on data from the Netherlands, which the Swiss consider highly analogous to their own country) doesn't prove a damn thing about intellectual property law or the state of entertainment businesses in the US, so stop drawing stupid parallels before you start.
I'd be a lot more proud of the guy if this demo was funded by someone who gives a shit about science.
Breitling makes designer watches for men. They don't fund this guy for the sake of science or nerd fun or any other interesting purpose.
His entire purpose up there is selling the James Bond image that marketers try to associate with fancy watches, expensive cognac, race car camp, etc. Really, Yves Rossy serves no higher purpose than the pair of DD tits on the fashion model draped over the man who just so happens to be wearing a Breitling watch.
I see from his biography that Rossy is a fighter pilot and aeronautical engineer who still flies commercially, so Breitling probably isn't his major backer. But still, the self-impressed, spendthrift 'gentleman' image he's shilling for with this flight disgusts me.
Much as humans hate them, mosquitoes constitute a potent food source to smaller vertebrates. Mammals represent massive concentrations of energy, and blood is a high energy substrate. Mosquitoes are a huge power source of fish, bats, etc. when they're caught still full of blood, and they're easy to catch.
I read in the one of the article links that the ecological impact isn't expected to be a serious problem, but I find that difficult to accept. And there are certainly detractors to that theory in the scientific community.
Is eradicating malaria, West Nile, etc. really worth the risks? They may be highly threatening to humans, but ultimately we still have to live here after the mosquitoes are gone...
I still can't fathom spending $300 on a video card....and feeling like I got a slammin deal in the process.
What happened to the red-hot competition of 2008, when I built my first modern system and got a newly released Radeon 4850 for $150? That card was maybe the fourth most powerful you could get; there was no serious improvement to be had without adding more dies, via either X2 cards or crossfire.
Now today the 560 Ti and the 6950 occupy the same relative position in the hierarchy of GPUs that my 4850 held in 2008...yet rather than being brand new and $150 those two cards are almost a year old and $250-$300.
Ouch.
I really hope publishers cave in and figure out a way of pricing things better.
I think I should be spending more on entertainment; I'm starting to feel much guiltier about stealing everything but comic books, occasional paperbacks, and the three video games per decade I like enough to buy a collector's edition.
At the same time, the release prices for entertainment are completely batshit crazy. Games are $60, books are $35, and movies are $12? Who can afford that crap? Those prices all fall pretty quickly, but can't they come up with a better model than fleecing their most eager customers and then doling it out one step at a time to the next most impressive or convenient formats?
I don't know; maybe they can't. I just know I laugh when I see those numbers breakdowns, and I've seen them from official sources multiple times, in which publishers swear to God they only make a 1% profit.
I was under the impression that computer science was a bubble degree: the latest degree that people with any shred of scientific acumen and no clue where they wanted to go in life acquired as their ticket to an upper-middle class paycheck. So what's surprising and disastrous about the bubble bursting? Isn't that what bubbles do?
I always hear people on slashdot bitching that half the youngsters getting computer science degrees today are incompetent code monkeys at best, and yet then I read stories the next week about the problem of declining interest or falling numbers in comp-sci education.
Which one is the truth? Shouldn't you be happy to see enrollments decline? Aren't you glad to see fewer incompetent, bobble-headed lemmings graduating and going out to make a bad name for all of you self-proclaimed 'competent' computer scientists?
I know half of you are screaming at your monitors that "security through obscurity is no security at all", but security in biological information is not like that of computer code and hardware.
It all comes down the the breadth and transparency of the ecosystem, in my layman's opinion. It's entirely plausible with, for example, Adobe software running on Windows operating systems to say that if White Hat A found it then certainly Grey Hat B and Mustache Twirling Russian Mafioso Black Hat C will find it or have already found and exploited it. Those are specific, limited, and completely knowable ecosystems invented entirely by humans, however. Of course someone else will find it; the universe in which "it" lives isn't terribly large, when you really look at the situation.
Biology, on the other hand, is much bigger and much more mysterious; we're far stupider in biology than in any other science. We certainly didn't invent, do not control, and do not understand the ecosystems involved. You know far less from the sentence "I found five mutations that transform a particular H5N1 into a global killer." than you do from the sentence "I found a stack overflow hack in Acrobat which lets me read any pdf the target machine opens."
In short, security through obscurity actually gets you a very long way in biological research. Not to mention that creating a virus is a lot faster than creating the vaccine; perhaps a substance of which a single vial released in downtown Detroit could kill half the humans on Earth long before the antidote was invented and adequately synthesized isn't the place to object on principle some deliberate obscurity.
Seriously, look at the way flu vaccines are prepared. Maybe people should argue for the development of a faster way of inventing and growing vaccine (that is to say, faster than trial-and-error monkey testing followed by incubation in chicken eggs) before they request that blueprints for a killer flu become public information.
Why are we discussing a Daily Mail article?
The Daily Mail is closer to a tabloid than to a newspaper. Technically it's 'middle-market', so it has some real stories in there, but I'd never rely on it as a sole source for any opinion or discussion....which is what this summary asks us to do.
Can we just agree that Apple hardware articles are flamebait by default, especially the ones about the mere possibility of new Apple hardware, and stop frickin posting them?
Passenger rail hasn't made money since the mid 1800's, going faster won't make it any more viable.
Then we've certainly been wasting an awful lot of money for an awfully long time. Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!
Seriously, citation please?
You can object to TSA practices - the violation of privacy, the ineffectiveness, and the rare but flagrant acts of sadism or molestation - without the pointless exaggeration. To hear you talk I'd be much safer and more comfortable wearing a "Democracy Now!" through Pyongyang Station than I would be boarding a California bullet train.
Blathering about pedophilia, fascism, and interrogations just makes your objections sound like paranoid ravings. Yes, you must be persistent, passionate, and creative in protecting your rights and protesting their violation, but above all you must be rational.
Your words are nothing but a disservice to anyone fighting for the Bill of Rights: it makes their job much harder when their rational objections become conflated with the rampant hyperbole and absurdly loaded language of people like you.
Your post wasn't exactly lengthy; of course I read it carefully. I even quoted the word 'normal', and stated that you were partially correct, in my summary sentence. Your problem is that you started your post with the dramatically overreaching statement that there was no evolutionary process for humans. A second (and final) sentence in which you only allude to understanding the reality doesn't cancel out the sheer foolishness of your first sentence.
If you think I misunderstood you then you have no cause for offense, unless you're offended by your own poor writing.
Since the development of civilization some 5000 years ago there hasn't been an evolutionary process for homo sapiens. The fact that man has pretty much controlled his environment since then has put an end to normal selection processes, as is evidenced by the explosion in population levels.
I don't think you understand evolution in a properly broad sense.
Evolution isn't only about selection pressure, for one thing. For every gene that becomes common because everyone without it died or didn't fuck enough (or the converse), there's another one that became common out of sheer randomness. Neutral drift, duplication events, etc. cause a lot of evolution, and occasionally lead to traits with massive selection coefficients, without those processes themselves or their intermediary products ever being subject to significant selection pressure.
Mankind is at least as susceptible to evolution as we ever were; I'd argue we're actually the most susceptible species that's ever existed. We've managed many selection pressures in ways no other present species can even emulate; that is true. We've also created unique, sapien-exclusive selection pressures upon ourselves, and greatly amplified other ordinary selection pressures, upon ourselves and the planet as a whole.
You're correct that some of our selection pressures are no longer 'normal'; you're completely wrong to suppose that we're no longer subject to evolution.
I see there are already five identical replies, so I'll pick yours at random to answer.
I'm not stupid; I understand that vaccines train the immune system. My point is that the kind of 'training' vaccines introduce is military in style: a strict vaccination schedule trains every single immune system on the same precise schedule, with identical doses of genetically identical antigens.
Training every single person against precisely the same threats in precisely the same way will work fine against the known threats, but we don't know what it does against the unknown threats. I'm not saying immune systems will be worse against unknown threats; I don't know. It may be a non-issue. It may also be that, just like monoculture in crops (although this is a much lesser degree; we're hardly producing immunological clones), giving everyone so much of the same training does makes us more vulnerable to various unknown threats in the long run. We may be training ourselves into greater susceptibility for a disease that doesn't even exist yet, one which preys precisely upon our highly similar resistances to so many other diseases. The massive variability of the human immune system is its greatest strength; anything that could train out some of that variability concerns me. It's a good question, and not one to be immediately dismissed as 'flamebait'.
I'm trying to raise a long-term, evolutionary question about the usefulness of vaccines. When I speak to a possible lack of 'training', I mean the kind of training that encourages diversity in our immunological gene pool rather than potentially discouraging it.
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Even if I accept your certain statement, with absolutely no evidence behind it, you've missed the point. You either didn't read my entire post or you didn't read the article and look into which vaccines the Australians are giving. My point is that Australia doesn't appear to be "decreasing the incidence of a few, serious infections"; they seem to be vaccinating against every single thing they possibly can. If a vaccine exists and there's more than a one in a hundred thousand chance of a child getting the disease, they'll give the vaccine.
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.