Great. I say something "might" be a concern and I get 'flamebait'. You state unequivocally that it "is" no concern at all, but do not provide evidence, and you get 'insightful'.
Way to stand up for good science, slashdot! How dare I raise a specific and scientifically valid question when I should have just done what Coldwetdog did and dismiss my own concerns by drawing a statistical certainty with absolutely no evidence?!
Not like I'm an evolutionary biologist or anything...oh wait! I am!
Vaccines may not cause autism, but the hygiene hypothesis remains a scientifically valid concern (so far as I know). This sounds like Australians are vaccinating children for everything they possibly can. Couple the heavy vaccination schedule with advances in food safety and constant household cleaning; these kids might have little besides flu and rhinovirus to train their immune systems, and that doesn't seem like a sustainable course.
We could legalize meth, have the government or some pharmacy make it safely, and then every loser that wants to do it won't be supporting the people who make it.
Just because the DEA overreaches and just because there are solid libertarian arguments for legalizing some drugs doesn't mean there are no substances for which prohibition makes good social, economic, and ethical sense....
Your idea sounds nice, but unless your plan includes banning the users of your legal dispensary from medical and dental care the fiscal costs alone are way too high. Amphetamine abuse causes serious neurological problems, well in excess of those potentially caused by alcohol, cocaine, or heroin; the burden of caring for addicts could be staggering. Severe depression, anxiety, concentration problems, motor impairment, etc. Not to mention the social and moral costs of, you know, just watching people cook themselves into death or permanent oblivion with product that you asked your government to manufacture and give to them.
If you firmly believe that people should have a right to get high, fine. But don't go spouting off about which particular substances should be available - without the pharmacology, economics, and ethics to back it up - simply to satisfy your libertarian impulse. That's not advocacy, it's sociopathy.
Well, at least we'll be safe in the English speaking world. Legitimate user reviews are always so intelligent and well-written I could easily distinguish freelancer's bullshit from the thoughts of intelligent users. Just look at the comments on Amazon and Youtube!
The funny part is that the OWS hippies are protesting because they want to impose the very kind of government which rolls tanks over protestors like that.
and I hope he has a problematic life for the rest of his life, too. I hope he can't get a job or gets made fun of by 'the other bullies in blue' until he dies.
I do understand that pepper spraying someone without cause is a violent crime, an insanely painful assault with occasional adverse reactions and even rare deaths, but how can you possibly advocate such a punishment?
Our theory of social wrong and our justice system are at least in theory based on reformation: people are punished in hope that they 'go forth and sin no more', to use the biblical phrasing. People are fired for gross misconduct at work and left to seek another job, not ostracized for life. Criminals are prosecuted, punished and then released under appropriate restrictions, not destroyed and left to suffer. If Lt. Pike is both a criminal and a bad employee why is it not sufficient to see him fired, bared from law enforcement, and prosecuted? Why do you want his life to be over? And what kind of sick bastard are you that you'd consider letting him continue working in law enforcement simply so he could endure the mockery of his co-workers? Leave a man who committed a violent crime in a position of physical authority, and then make his life steadily worse? Where do you think that's going to end?
You're asking us to ruin a man's life rather than give him a second chance, to torture him forever rather than rehabilitate and restrict him. Your options are that he endure constant abuse at work or be unable to work at all? Why not just shoot him?
How is this vengeful destruction of this man's dignity and potential any better than than what he's done to the protesters? How can you call yourself American when you advocate vengeance and lifelong suffering in the name of justice?
If 'his type is what is wrong with America' then what are you? Do you believe you're what's right with America?!
Completely taking tax increases off the table is stupid and shortsighted.
I'm not sure if you can lay it all on Norquist, but he's clearly the most powerful proponent of the stupidest, most obstructive Republicans in the budget mess. Norquist, the 96.5% of the Republicans in congress (238 of 242 House, 41 of 47 Senate) who signed his pledge, and every single Republican candidate won't do anything that raises taxes by a single dollar.
And check out this:
In a debate in August, Republican presidential candidates were asked whether they would support a budget deal that bundled $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. All said no. They rejected any deal that involved raising taxes.
So they hate raising taxes. We get it. These assholes still can't accept a proposal that goes in their favor 11 to 1? They reject it out of hand before even talking about what the spending cuts would be? Are they joking?!??!?
Who the fuck supports a platform, for a major party in a democratic republic, that says: "We get every single thing we want and you get nothing you want. If you don't comply, we'll watch it all burn until you give it."
That's not debate. That's not governing. It's fucking economic terrorism; it's taking hostage of 295 million people to satisfy your ideological hard-on.
The bulldozer is faster then the Xeon chip on all cpu benchmarks which can generate enough threads to fill all cores.
Each bulldozer core is as fast as a core on a Opteron 6100.
It looks exactly like the cpu I want in my web/db server, and my supercomputer.
Do the majority of real world uses 'fill all cores'? Are you arguing that the vast majority of these benchmarks are useless? I can't distinguish between which tests use all of the cores and which don't, but it's not my field.
However, the results fall far short of a resounding success for AMD. The results are broadly split between "tied with Opteron 6100" and "33 percent or less faster than Opteron 6100." For a processor with 33 percent more cores, running highly scalable multithreaded workloads, that's a poor show. Best-case, AMD has stood still in terms of per-thread performance. Worst case, the Bulldozer architecture is so much slower than AMD's old design that the new design needs four more threads just to match the old design. AMD compromised single-threaded performance in order to allow Bulldozer to run more threads concurrently, and that trade-off simply hasn't been worth it.
That's the problem. There are several instances in which AMD isn't even beating itself. Almost none of the tests show it working better than the old 6100 Opterons on a per-core basis. And the Xeons the 6200 only sometimes beat are 18 months old; new Xeons ship next quarter. I suppose if I accept your statement about "filling all cores" at face value, given my general ignorance of the server market, then I have to admit that Bulldozer could be superior in situations that filled all of the cores most or all of the time. Is that a significant potential market share? Does it justify an entirely new architecture?
Well, I guess I'm wrong. I remember hearing a lot about the harsher sentencing for convicts and the tricky, highly multi-faceted roles Judge Advocates have to play compared to civilian attorneys, and I must have irrationally conflated all those concerns with poor treatment of the accused.
I do know a guy who's due to start JAG training at UVA this year. I'll be curious to learn more about the real work.
And since it's a military trial, he pretty much has to prove not only that he's innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt but further prove who actually did do it. He also has to prove cold fusion using only a pack of gum, a microwave oven, and the complete MacGyver dvd box set.
I'm being facetious, of course, but US military justice isn't famous for its fairness or friendliness to the accused. Just thought people should be aware that he's pretty much screwed whether or not there's any conspiracy to get him convicted.
Nice hyperbole, but I didn't say that people from other countries expect the US intelligence community to save their asses, or even that Americans give a fuck about other countries (too many of them don't). I didn't specify at all who expected them to catch every threat, so your entire post is a self-indulgent rant.
Since you asked (well, didn't ask really, but wasted six lines ranting about your pure conjecture on a tangential topic), I only meant that Americans expect US intelligence to catch credible threats. When bombs go off or some revolution heats up that the CIA had no idea about people some people get testy, including some people in the congress, if only because they wish they had more time to plan their own reaction and hold intelligence responsible for not giving it to them.
You know, the Soviets were perfectly welcome in a lot of places on continents that weren't western Europe and in countries that didn't rhyme with Hysterica.
I don't know enough history to even hazard a guess at whether Westerners or Soviets were more welcome, in general, worldwide. But you could take off the Westerners rose-colored glasses for a minute and realize that the Soviets weren't necessarily the crazed, universally despised whackjobs you see in Bond movies. Stalin, yes. The entire Soviet Union, probably not.
You do realize that all businesses successful under capitalism engage in anti-competitive behavior, right? It's called competing, ironically enough. You compete by beating down other competitors, and if you actually care at all about profits and/or actually believe you have the best product you hope you beat them dead.
I personally think the only capitalist system which won't be anti-competitive in practice and eventually miserable for the general public is one so heavily regulated it occasionally teeters on the brink of socialism. I'm also not averse to actual socialism, but I think pure capitalism was a cruel, inhumane fiction from the beginning (and now that I've said that this comment will be modded down into the depths of -1 troll/flamebait/'overrated').
You can believe in the benefits of more than one of the fundamental economic systems at once. I promise you won't die. You can even mix them together; it's usually even better that way. It's like a tasty, tasty swirl cone with both chocolate AND vanilla!
Again, once a gene has been heavily selected it doesn't automatically become less common when the selection pressure slackens, nor does every evolutionary development come with a drawback.
I see this particular argument on most threads that deals with evolution. While I applaud slashdot for generally understanding that evolution doesn't 'foresee' anything or optimize for every situation or come without drawbacks, it's an irrational conclusion that evolution always comes with drawbacks or that it can never make even one trait of an organism effectively optimal for every situation will actually encounter on the natural Earth (the natural Earth including inside human bodies, where antibiotics must be effective).
What slashdotters don't understand is that many of the things evolution does not do as a rule it is nonetheless perfectly capable of doing as a coincidence in a given case. A stopped clock is right twice a day, or whatever.
Ah, yes. Because it doesn't matter if something takes pains to accommodate its critics (even directly admitting fault where necessary as I did in that second post), takes pains not to use loaded language, and sincerely appeals to science and reason. If it's controversial, factually incorrect in whole or in part, or contains what could by the most tortured reading be construed as insulting to an internet sacred cow the discerning slashdot reader can go ahead and call it a troll.
Never mind that I've had comments which were sincere, civil, nuanced, and lengthy modded down to -1 troll while replies that contained literally nothing more than "fuck you, troll" achieved +5 insightful. That's not ludicrously hypocritical or supportive of groupthink or anything. I'm not saying I've never deserved a troll mod, or never been modded up while insulting someone else, but that doesn't mean it's truly right for such things to happen systematically with certain viewpoints and certain topics.
For the thousandth time, go do some reading on the terms "troll" and "flamebait". You'll realize that you, and most of slashdot, use them incorrectly 50% or more of the time.
Think of it as giving the bacteria an allergic reaction. Those that exhibit the immunity will waste an appreciable amount of energy, putting pressure against that particular immunity gene.
Then you're only creating a population of bacteria with a workaround for both your antibiotic and your (extremely hypothetical and circuitous) induced 'allergy'.
Seriously. Bacteria. Octillions of them. You simply can't follow the rabbit hole far enough to catch all the of the combinations of genes they'll come up with for dealing with your attacks, counter-attacks, trojan horses, etc. Human tactics simply do not work, and I'd actually bet my life that they never will.
You really do seem to understand some biology, but I think you understand it as chemistry. More specifically, as energetics. What you're not getting is the sheer scale, the raw entropy the immense number of bacteria and their basal mutation rate add to the equation.
You can fool some of the bacteria all of the time, but you can not fool all of the bacteria all of the time. And within a given species, only all of them all of the time will make a given treatment permanently effective. And that's not possible.
Wow. Way to miss (and then re-prove) my point in the most hilariously over-the-top way possible. I swear, either you're a comic genius or the stupidest person I've ever met.
If you'd included the rest of your quotation we'd have seen that chiropractors criticized the results as focusing solely on neck manipulation while the greatest claimed benefits in chiropractic tend to come from back manipulation of people with back problems. That was my very first thought as well, and I'm not even terribly familiar with the actual mechanics of chiropractics.
I think 'scientifically proven effective' was far too much praise for me to offer. Allow me to backpedal a bit. Again, I'm not saying it's well understood or that it's risk free, but there are studies without any fatal flaws suggesting that it's quite effective. You may say "oh great, studies without any fatal flaw!", but there isn't a significant body of high quality research on the topic supporting any conclusion.
As I said before, just because it doesn't do half the stuff it's crazier cheerleaders claim doesn't mean it's worthless. Based on your quoted selection and your general impression of the data you can advocate for better research, you can advocate for restricting neck manipulation, but what you can't look do is look at clinical evidence that is, at the most cynical interpretation, only slightly negative on the whole and call chiropractics worthless.
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but with hundreds of thousands of positive anecdotes and no conclusive research one way or another it's ludicrously dishonest to say chiropractics is simply unscientific crap.
And as an aside, if anyone is getting ready to throw out competing anecdotes about chiropractors who fucked up people's spines, please just stop before you start. Until you prove that the ratio of bad chiropractors significantly exceeds the ratio of bad doctors and dentists, and that the actual techniques of chiropractics are flawed, you can't go spouting off without revealing yourself as an intellectually dishonest twit. There are bad doctors, bad dentists, and bad practices in medicine and dentistry just as there are in any field, and just as there are certainly are in chiropractics. It's patently ludicrous to condemn an entire field just because it isn't literally perfect, or because it contains the same bad apples you find in any other field. If anything, those problems should decrease if and when it's proven totally effective and subject to better regulation based on better knowledge of best practices. Keeping it out on the fringe because you cherry-pick the negative studies will never do anyone any good at all.
Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Not exactly. The bacteria evolved their resistance genes under extremely intense selection pressures. Novel antibiotics are the hydrogen bombs of the microbiology world. The bacteria survived in a given person because there are quintillions of them, reproducing dozens of times per day. Their natural mutation rate brute forced a genetic solution to the problem.
However, genetic drift (the process by which genes could disappear at the population or species level when they're not under any selection pressure, as the resistance genes wouldn't be if we stopped using an antibiotic) isn't inherently quick, and it's slower with larger population sizes, so bacteria - with worldwide population sizes in the octillions - are pretty much immune to losing any gene entirely that isn't experiencing an active selection pressure.
All of this is to say that, baring a wait time of hundreds of trillions of years, there's almost no chance the genes lending resistance to a particular antibiotic will leave a bacterial species once they've arrived. By the time humans notice a resistance it's way too late.
The best you can do is moderate your use of antibiotics and buy yourself more useful time with each particular drug, as less usage is less selection pressure. There's never going to be a way of recovering an antibiotic that's already being resisted, however.
Troll much? Your mistake was mentioning the word "Chiropractor."/. is a place for real science discussion.
While he is a troll, you're about 50 years behind the times if you think chiropractics is not "real science". It may not be half the things crazed, ultra-vegan proselytizers claim it is, but neither are hemp clothing, crystal therapy, or rose hips. That doesn't mean we stop using hemp plants, rocks, or herbs where they are useful to human life.
Chiropractics can put people back to work who previously suffered debilitating pain which nothing short of heroin could even dent. It's scientifically proven effective even if it isn't as scientifically understood as most allopathic therapies (and you'd be amazed how many approved pharmaceuticals suffer exactly the same paradox).
God, if there's one thing I can't stand in scientific discussion it's insouciant little fuckwits life you who can't distinguish between following scientific principles and looking down their noses at every therapy or principle which didn't begin and end its formal trials in a laboratory. Well, people who think it's 'scientific' to smugly doubt every theory until it's proven better than 99.99% likely are a close second.
In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear
Some bacteria replicate every 20 minutes. That's 72 opportunities a day for them to catch onto at least the beginnings of a method to bypass an antibiotic. And mutations are to increasing environmental survivability as brute force cracking is to opening a file with 2056-bit XYZ+ encryption. It'll work eventually, but 99.99999% of the time (literally) you and your entire family tree are long dead before anything significant happens.
Good thing there are at least 100 quadrillion bacterial cells inside every human body, for a grand total of a fucking buttload of bacterial family trees to carry on the crack. Not to mention the uncountable number outside of humans, mutating and reproducing in thousands of different environments but all theoretically capable of suddenly mutating that one last step that allows them to survive in a human body while completely bypassing the human immune system and antibiotics almost entirely.
Anyone who, in the last 25 years, ever thought antibiotics were a persistent defense system against bacteria was hopelessly optimistic and misinformed about microbiology.
Overall, people just need to calm the hell down. I'm not saying we stop treating disease or cease using antibiotics or saying any other defeatist, fatalist nonsense. I'm just saying we exist at the pleasure of the bacteria, prions, and viruses that outnumber other terrestrial life by a factor of trillions. It's just one of those things that could kill us at any second but probably won't, like asteroid strikes and nuclear war. The sooner Westerners have their collective "How I learned to stop worrying and love bacteria" moment, the better. We can move on to things we can actually can full control.
I really pity the American intelligence community. They're expected to catch every single credible threat, not just to America but to any nation or political figure on the planet, without going so much as a micron past the ever-shifting 'too far' and 'possibly not far enough' marks at risk of being flat-out pilloried in venues far more hysterical and influential than this.
Between the conservatives who claim we've still not gone far enough in fighting terror and the liberals who scream at any infinitesimal possibility of privacy violations but still want a potent intelligence apparatus - and the general public's simultaneous sympathy for both sides - it's impossible to win. The safe operating widths of the intelligence community (on some hypothetical number line ranging from "knows everything about everybody in real time" to "won't so much as question a guy carrying dynamite up the Capitol steps without first consulting the Human Rights Commission and the ACLU") are almost always measured in negative numbers, and large ones at that.
I mean seriously. Many liberals and libertarians are demanding surveillance policies so dense and cautious that no intelligence organization could reasonably decide on manpower and human judgment alone whether to stop a possibly dangerous person from entering the country until well after he's either blown up a building or completed his perfectly innocuous two-week business trip, whichever comes later. And, as in the reaction to this story, God help them if they use computers, networking, and/or any persistent databases to speed up that decision!
And if it's not the liberals and libertarians bitching about even the slightest possibility of privacy violations, it's the conservatives who say we might as well erect a thirty foot electrified fence around the entire nation and fire mortars at everyone who approaches wearing more than a see-through jockstrap and an implanted, US-made chip containing their passport, complete encrypted biometric profile, and HD-video of their entire life up to the moment they walked into view of the mortar teams.
Ah, yes, the inevitable pile of 1984 analogies that comes up for every single fucking story that relates to privacy or government authority in any way. At least yours is a largely correct interpretation of the book, conveys the impression that you actually read it, and comes in response to a topic where the book has some applicability.
Now we just need some sacharine, hyperbolic "first they came for..." parodies, then a few posters to angrily dismiss any voices of moderation on grounds that the very first overstep of government authority on privacy matters that isn't met with outright caterwauling will lead to a full-fledged totalitarian state (just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning), and we'll have the Slashdot Privacy Discussion Trifecta.
Again, not to pick on you in particular, Pharmboy. Yours isn't far off. It's just that as someone with thorough knowledge of 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, the Postman, etc. it's so fucking obnoxious and tiring for me to see people misquote, misunderstand, and exaggerate the dystopic classics so dramatically, day in and day out.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. I say something "might" be a concern and I get 'flamebait'. You state unequivocally that it "is" no concern at all, but do not provide evidence, and you get 'insightful'.
Way to stand up for good science, slashdot! How dare I raise a specific and scientifically valid question when I should have just done what Coldwetdog did and dismiss my own concerns by drawing a statistical certainty with absolutely no evidence?!
Not like I'm an evolutionary biologist or anything...oh wait! I am!
Vaccines may not cause autism, but the hygiene hypothesis remains a scientifically valid concern (so far as I know). This sounds like Australians are vaccinating children for everything they possibly can. Couple the heavy vaccination schedule with advances in food safety and constant household cleaning; these kids might have little besides flu and rhinovirus to train their immune systems, and that doesn't seem like a sustainable course.
We could legalize meth, have the government or some pharmacy make it safely, and then every loser that wants to do it won't be supporting the people who make it.
Just because the DEA overreaches and just because there are solid libertarian arguments for legalizing some drugs doesn't mean there are no substances for which prohibition makes good social, economic, and ethical sense....
Your idea sounds nice, but unless your plan includes banning the users of your legal dispensary from medical and dental care the fiscal costs alone are way too high. Amphetamine abuse causes serious neurological problems, well in excess of those potentially caused by alcohol, cocaine, or heroin; the burden of caring for addicts could be staggering. Severe depression, anxiety, concentration problems, motor impairment, etc. Not to mention the social and moral costs of, you know, just watching people cook themselves into death or permanent oblivion with product that you asked your government to manufacture and give to them.
If you firmly believe that people should have a right to get high, fine. But don't go spouting off about which particular substances should be available - without the pharmacology, economics, and ethics to back it up - simply to satisfy your libertarian impulse. That's not advocacy, it's sociopathy.
Well I was still trying to make sense of that one right up to the word "diabetes".
Good God I'm easy....
Well, at least we'll be safe in the English speaking world. Legitimate user reviews are always so intelligent and well-written I could easily distinguish freelancer's bullshit from the thoughts of intelligent users. Just look at the comments on Amazon and Youtube!
The funny part is that the OWS hippies are protesting because they want to impose the very kind of government which rolls tanks over protestors like that.
Huh?
and I hope he has a problematic life for the rest of his life, too. I hope he can't get a job or gets made fun of by 'the other bullies in blue' until he dies.
I do understand that pepper spraying someone without cause is a violent crime, an insanely painful assault with occasional adverse reactions and even rare deaths, but how can you possibly advocate such a punishment?
Our theory of social wrong and our justice system are at least in theory based on reformation: people are punished in hope that they 'go forth and sin no more', to use the biblical phrasing. People are fired for gross misconduct at work and left to seek another job, not ostracized for life. Criminals are prosecuted, punished and then released under appropriate restrictions, not destroyed and left to suffer. If Lt. Pike is both a criminal and a bad employee why is it not sufficient to see him fired, bared from law enforcement, and prosecuted? Why do you want his life to be over? And what kind of sick bastard are you that you'd consider letting him continue working in law enforcement simply so he could endure the mockery of his co-workers? Leave a man who committed a violent crime in a position of physical authority, and then make his life steadily worse? Where do you think that's going to end?
You're asking us to ruin a man's life rather than give him a second chance, to torture him forever rather than rehabilitate and restrict him. Your options are that he endure constant abuse at work or be unable to work at all? Why not just shoot him?
How is this vengeful destruction of this man's dignity and potential any better than than what he's done to the protesters? How can you call yourself American when you advocate vengeance and lifelong suffering in the name of justice?
If 'his type is what is wrong with America' then what are you? Do you believe you're what's right with America?!
Completely taking tax increases off the table is stupid and shortsighted.
I'm not sure if you can lay it all on Norquist, but he's clearly the most powerful proponent of the stupidest, most obstructive Republicans in the budget mess. Norquist, the 96.5% of the Republicans in congress (238 of 242 House, 41 of 47 Senate) who signed his pledge, and every single Republican candidate won't do anything that raises taxes by a single dollar.
And check out this:
In a debate in August, Republican presidential candidates were asked whether they would support a budget deal that bundled $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. All said no. They rejected any deal that involved raising taxes.
So they hate raising taxes. We get it. These assholes still can't accept a proposal that goes in their favor 11 to 1? They reject it out of hand before even talking about what the spending cuts would be? Are they joking?!??!?
Who the fuck supports a platform, for a major party in a democratic republic, that says: "We get every single thing we want and you get nothing you want. If you don't comply, we'll watch it all burn until you give it."
That's not debate. That's not governing. It's fucking economic terrorism; it's taking hostage of 295 million people to satisfy your ideological hard-on.
I really don't get the conclusion.
The bulldozer is faster then the Xeon chip on all cpu benchmarks which can generate enough threads to fill all cores.
Each bulldozer core is as fast as a core on a Opteron 6100.
It looks exactly like the cpu I want in my web/db server, and my supercomputer.
Do the majority of real world uses 'fill all cores'? Are you arguing that the vast majority of these benchmarks are useless? I can't distinguish between which tests use all of the cores and which don't, but it's not my field.
However, the results fall far short of a resounding success for AMD. The results are broadly split between "tied with Opteron 6100" and "33 percent or less faster than Opteron 6100." For a processor with 33 percent more cores, running highly scalable multithreaded workloads, that's a poor show. Best-case, AMD has stood still in terms of per-thread performance. Worst case, the Bulldozer architecture is so much slower than AMD's old design that the new design needs four more threads just to match the old design. AMD compromised single-threaded performance in order to allow Bulldozer to run more threads concurrently, and that trade-off simply hasn't been worth it.
That's the problem. There are several instances in which AMD isn't even beating itself. Almost none of the tests show it working better than the old 6100 Opterons on a per-core basis. And the Xeons the 6200 only sometimes beat are 18 months old; new Xeons ship next quarter. I suppose if I accept your statement about "filling all cores" at face value, given my general ignorance of the server market, then I have to admit that Bulldozer could be superior in situations that filled all of the cores most or all of the time. Is that a significant potential market share? Does it justify an entirely new architecture?
Well, I guess I'm wrong. I remember hearing a lot about the harsher sentencing for convicts and the tricky, highly multi-faceted roles Judge Advocates have to play compared to civilian attorneys, and I must have irrationally conflated all those concerns with poor treatment of the accused.
I do know a guy who's due to start JAG training at UVA this year. I'll be curious to learn more about the real work.
And since it's a military trial, he pretty much has to prove not only that he's innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt but further prove who actually did do it. He also has to prove cold fusion using only a pack of gum, a microwave oven, and the complete MacGyver dvd box set.
I'm being facetious, of course, but US military justice isn't famous for its fairness or friendliness to the accused. Just thought people should be aware that he's pretty much screwed whether or not there's any conspiracy to get him convicted.
Ha! And I'm the troll. Well, at least you're amusing, too.
Nice hyperbole, but I didn't say that people from other countries expect the US intelligence community to save their asses, or even that Americans give a fuck about other countries (too many of them don't). I didn't specify at all who expected them to catch every threat, so your entire post is a self-indulgent rant.
Since you asked (well, didn't ask really, but wasted six lines ranting about your pure conjecture on a tangential topic), I only meant that Americans expect US intelligence to catch credible threats. When bombs go off or some revolution heats up that the CIA had no idea about people some people get testy, including some people in the congress, if only because they wish they had more time to plan their own reaction and hold intelligence responsible for not giving it to them.
You know, the Soviets were perfectly welcome in a lot of places on continents that weren't western Europe and in countries that didn't rhyme with Hysterica.
I don't know enough history to even hazard a guess at whether Westerners or Soviets were more welcome, in general, worldwide. But you could take off the Westerners rose-colored glasses for a minute and realize that the Soviets weren't necessarily the crazed, universally despised whackjobs you see in Bond movies. Stalin, yes. The entire Soviet Union, probably not.
The capitalist in me screams, "Anti-competitive!"
You do realize that all businesses successful under capitalism engage in anti-competitive behavior, right? It's called competing, ironically enough. You compete by beating down other competitors, and if you actually care at all about profits and/or actually believe you have the best product you hope you beat them dead.
I personally think the only capitalist system which won't be anti-competitive in practice and eventually miserable for the general public is one so heavily regulated it occasionally teeters on the brink of socialism. I'm also not averse to actual socialism, but I think pure capitalism was a cruel, inhumane fiction from the beginning (and now that I've said that this comment will be modded down into the depths of -1 troll/flamebait/'overrated').
You can believe in the benefits of more than one of the fundamental economic systems at once. I promise you won't die. You can even mix them together; it's usually even better that way. It's like a tasty, tasty swirl cone with both chocolate AND vanilla!
Again, once a gene has been heavily selected it doesn't automatically become less common when the selection pressure slackens, nor does every evolutionary development come with a drawback.
I see this particular argument on most threads that deals with evolution. While I applaud slashdot for generally understanding that evolution doesn't 'foresee' anything or optimize for every situation or come without drawbacks, it's an irrational conclusion that evolution always comes with drawbacks or that it can never make even one trait of an organism effectively optimal for every situation will actually encounter on the natural Earth (the natural Earth including inside human bodies, where antibiotics must be effective).
What slashdotters don't understand is that many of the things evolution does not do as a rule it is nonetheless perfectly capable of doing as a coincidence in a given case. A stopped clock is right twice a day, or whatever.
Ah, yes. Because it doesn't matter if something takes pains to accommodate its critics (even directly admitting fault where necessary as I did in that second post), takes pains not to use loaded language, and sincerely appeals to science and reason. If it's controversial, factually incorrect in whole or in part, or contains what could by the most tortured reading be construed as insulting to an internet sacred cow the discerning slashdot reader can go ahead and call it a troll.
Never mind that I've had comments which were sincere, civil, nuanced, and lengthy modded down to -1 troll while replies that contained literally nothing more than "fuck you, troll" achieved +5 insightful. That's not ludicrously hypocritical or supportive of groupthink or anything. I'm not saying I've never deserved a troll mod, or never been modded up while insulting someone else, but that doesn't mean it's truly right for such things to happen systematically with certain viewpoints and certain topics.
For the thousandth time, go do some reading on the terms "troll" and "flamebait". You'll realize that you, and most of slashdot, use them incorrectly 50% or more of the time.
Think of it as giving the bacteria an allergic reaction. Those that exhibit the immunity will waste an appreciable amount of energy, putting pressure against that particular immunity gene.
Then you're only creating a population of bacteria with a workaround for both your antibiotic and your (extremely hypothetical and circuitous) induced 'allergy'.
Seriously. Bacteria. Octillions of them. You simply can't follow the rabbit hole far enough to catch all the of the combinations of genes they'll come up with for dealing with your attacks, counter-attacks, trojan horses, etc. Human tactics simply do not work, and I'd actually bet my life that they never will.
You really do seem to understand some biology, but I think you understand it as chemistry. More specifically, as energetics. What you're not getting is the sheer scale, the raw entropy the immense number of bacteria and their basal mutation rate add to the equation.
You can fool some of the bacteria all of the time, but you can not fool all of the bacteria all of the time. And within a given species, only all of them all of the time will make a given treatment permanently effective. And that's not possible.
Wow. Way to miss (and then re-prove) my point in the most hilariously over-the-top way possible. I swear, either you're a comic genius or the stupidest person I've ever met.
If you'd included the rest of your quotation we'd have seen that chiropractors criticized the results as focusing solely on neck manipulation while the greatest claimed benefits in chiropractic tend to come from back manipulation of people with back problems. That was my very first thought as well, and I'm not even terribly familiar with the actual mechanics of chiropractics.
I think 'scientifically proven effective' was far too much praise for me to offer. Allow me to backpedal a bit. Again, I'm not saying it's well understood or that it's risk free, but there are studies without any fatal flaws suggesting that it's quite effective. You may say "oh great, studies without any fatal flaw!", but there isn't a significant body of high quality research on the topic supporting any conclusion. As I said before, just because it doesn't do half the stuff it's crazier cheerleaders claim doesn't mean it's worthless. Based on your quoted selection and your general impression of the data you can advocate for better research, you can advocate for restricting neck manipulation, but what you can't look do is look at clinical evidence that is, at the most cynical interpretation, only slightly negative on the whole and call chiropractics worthless.
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but with hundreds of thousands of positive anecdotes and no conclusive research one way or another it's ludicrously dishonest to say chiropractics is simply unscientific crap.
And as an aside, if anyone is getting ready to throw out competing anecdotes about chiropractors who fucked up people's spines, please just stop before you start. Until you prove that the ratio of bad chiropractors significantly exceeds the ratio of bad doctors and dentists, and that the actual techniques of chiropractics are flawed, you can't go spouting off without revealing yourself as an intellectually dishonest twit. There are bad doctors, bad dentists, and bad practices in medicine and dentistry just as there are in any field, and just as there are certainly are in chiropractics. It's patently ludicrous to condemn an entire field just because it isn't literally perfect, or because it contains the same bad apples you find in any other field. If anything, those problems should decrease if and when it's proven totally effective and subject to better regulation based on better knowledge of best practices. Keeping it out on the fringe because you cherry-pick the negative studies will never do anyone any good at all.
Evolution cuts both ways, bacteria may evolve a resistance to antibiotics but they give something up in the process. If you remove the stimulus then, given time, the process will reverse.
Not exactly. The bacteria evolved their resistance genes under extremely intense selection pressures. Novel antibiotics are the hydrogen bombs of the microbiology world. The bacteria survived in a given person because there are quintillions of them, reproducing dozens of times per day. Their natural mutation rate brute forced a genetic solution to the problem.
However, genetic drift (the process by which genes could disappear at the population or species level when they're not under any selection pressure, as the resistance genes wouldn't be if we stopped using an antibiotic) isn't inherently quick, and it's slower with larger population sizes, so bacteria - with worldwide population sizes in the octillions - are pretty much immune to losing any gene entirely that isn't experiencing an active selection pressure.
All of this is to say that, baring a wait time of hundreds of trillions of years, there's almost no chance the genes lending resistance to a particular antibiotic will leave a bacterial species once they've arrived. By the time humans notice a resistance it's way too late.
The best you can do is moderate your use of antibiotics and buy yourself more useful time with each particular drug, as less usage is less selection pressure. There's never going to be a way of recovering an antibiotic that's already being resisted, however.
Troll much? Your mistake was mentioning the word "Chiropractor." /. is a place for real science discussion.
While he is a troll, you're about 50 years behind the times if you think chiropractics is not "real science". It may not be half the things crazed, ultra-vegan proselytizers claim it is, but neither are hemp clothing, crystal therapy, or rose hips. That doesn't mean we stop using hemp plants, rocks, or herbs where they are useful to human life.
Chiropractics can put people back to work who previously suffered debilitating pain which nothing short of heroin could even dent. It's scientifically proven effective even if it isn't as scientifically understood as most allopathic therapies (and you'd be amazed how many approved pharmaceuticals suffer exactly the same paradox).
God, if there's one thing I can't stand in scientific discussion it's insouciant little fuckwits life you who can't distinguish between following scientific principles and looking down their noses at every therapy or principle which didn't begin and end its formal trials in a laboratory. Well, people who think it's 'scientific' to smugly doubt every theory until it's proven better than 99.99% likely are a close second.
In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear
Some bacteria replicate every 20 minutes. That's 72 opportunities a day for them to catch onto at least the beginnings of a method to bypass an antibiotic. And mutations are to increasing environmental survivability as brute force cracking is to opening a file with 2056-bit XYZ+ encryption. It'll work eventually, but 99.99999% of the time (literally) you and your entire family tree are long dead before anything significant happens.
Good thing there are at least 100 quadrillion bacterial cells inside every human body, for a grand total of a fucking buttload of bacterial family trees to carry on the crack. Not to mention the uncountable number outside of humans, mutating and reproducing in thousands of different environments but all theoretically capable of suddenly mutating that one last step that allows them to survive in a human body while completely bypassing the human immune system and antibiotics almost entirely.
Anyone who, in the last 25 years, ever thought antibiotics were a persistent defense system against bacteria was hopelessly optimistic and misinformed about microbiology.
Overall, people just need to calm the hell down. I'm not saying we stop treating disease or cease using antibiotics or saying any other defeatist, fatalist nonsense. I'm just saying we exist at the pleasure of the bacteria, prions, and viruses that outnumber other terrestrial life by a factor of trillions. It's just one of those things that could kill us at any second but probably won't, like asteroid strikes and nuclear war. The sooner Westerners have their collective "How I learned to stop worrying and love bacteria" moment, the better. We can move on to things we can actually can full control.
I really pity the American intelligence community. They're expected to catch every single credible threat, not just to America but to any nation or political figure on the planet, without going so much as a micron past the ever-shifting 'too far' and 'possibly not far enough' marks at risk of being flat-out pilloried in venues far more hysterical and influential than this.
Between the conservatives who claim we've still not gone far enough in fighting terror and the liberals who scream at any infinitesimal possibility of privacy violations but still want a potent intelligence apparatus - and the general public's simultaneous sympathy for both sides - it's impossible to win. The safe operating widths of the intelligence community (on some hypothetical number line ranging from "knows everything about everybody in real time" to "won't so much as question a guy carrying dynamite up the Capitol steps without first consulting the Human Rights Commission and the ACLU") are almost always measured in negative numbers, and large ones at that.
I mean seriously. Many liberals and libertarians are demanding surveillance policies so dense and cautious that no intelligence organization could reasonably decide on manpower and human judgment alone whether to stop a possibly dangerous person from entering the country until well after he's either blown up a building or completed his perfectly innocuous two-week business trip, whichever comes later. And, as in the reaction to this story, God help them if they use computers, networking, and/or any persistent databases to speed up that decision!
And if it's not the liberals and libertarians bitching about even the slightest possibility of privacy violations, it's the conservatives who say we might as well erect a thirty foot electrified fence around the entire nation and fire mortars at everyone who approaches wearing more than a see-through jockstrap and an implanted, US-made chip containing their passport, complete encrypted biometric profile, and HD-video of their entire life up to the moment they walked into view of the mortar teams.
Ah, yes, the inevitable pile of 1984 analogies that comes up for every single fucking story that relates to privacy or government authority in any way. At least yours is a largely correct interpretation of the book, conveys the impression that you actually read it, and comes in response to a topic where the book has some applicability.
Now we just need some sacharine, hyperbolic "first they came for..." parodies, then a few posters to angrily dismiss any voices of moderation on grounds that the very first overstep of government authority on privacy matters that isn't met with outright caterwauling will lead to a full-fledged totalitarian state (just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning), and we'll have the Slashdot Privacy Discussion Trifecta.
Again, not to pick on you in particular, Pharmboy. Yours isn't far off. It's just that as someone with thorough knowledge of 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, the Postman, etc. it's so fucking obnoxious and tiring for me to see people misquote, misunderstand, and exaggerate the dystopic classics so dramatically, day in and day out.